Kuhn’s Paradigm and a Scientific Border Dispute

In his review of my book Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, Kenneth Wilson (Physics Today, March 2001, page 53 ) proves to be more Kuhnian than perhaps Kuhn himself. But since I argue that Kuhn’s paradigm-based theory of scientific change was largely a bad idea that nevertheless suited its time, it should come as no surprise that Wilson misses the spirit of much of what I wrote.

To be sure, Wilson compliments my book for its account of the philosophy and sociology of science as “pre-paradigm” sciences. He seems to think that these fields are about to embark on a Kuhnian trajectory to normal science, which he takes to be a good thing. However, my point was that, insofar as philosophy and sociology of science have adopted Kuhn’s model as their own, they have lost much of their critical edge and have become increasingly obtuse to the changing social character of scientific work.

But would Wilson want to see these fields become paradigms? A strict Kuhnian line implies that professional philosophers and sociologists would be the sole arbiters of what counts as adequate philosophical and sociological research about science. Just as a paradigm-defining moment in the history of science came when the experimentalist Robert Boyle successfully excluded the metaphysician Thomas Hobbes from the Royal Society, so, too, philosophers and sociologists of science would need to exclude scientists from their ranks. And just as we no longer expect experimental scientists to know much about metaphysics, so, too, we would come not to expect philosophers and sociologists of science to know much about science.

So the strict Kuhnian line is simply the “hard line” adopted by many science studies scholars in the ongoing “science wars.” I doubt that Wilson would want to follow Kuhn’s logic this far, since it would render the philosophy and sociology of science irrelevant to the conduct of science. But if philosophy and sociology of science should remain permeable to scientists, then scientists must also keep their borders open to philosophical and sociological investigation.

Getting beyond Kuhn requires more than mutual accommodation or, as Wilson suggests, a role for science studies as the public relations wing of the scientific community. Rather, it involves a concerted effort to disarm the institutional and intellectual borders that currently divide practitioners of the natural and human sciences. The first step, as I argue in Thomas Kuhn, would be to reintegrate the study of history, philosophy, and sociology into the natural science curriculum. For Kuhn, this would be the ultimate step backward in science. But then Kuhn also denied that the sciences were united in a quest to understand a common reality that transcends any particular paradigm.