“Paradigm Shift”. We could stop the discussion of Kuhn’s 1962 work with those two words which, literally, created a paradigm shift in the conversation around systemic change, not just in science, but nearly all fields and disciplines. Paradigm shift, it’s safe to say, covers the spectrum of human endeavor, scholarly and not.
This edition features both Kuhn’s own 1969 (somewhat defensive) postscript as well as a brilliant essay (2012) by Ian Hacking that contextualizes Structure with 50 years of hindsight:
Although Structure had an immense immediate impact on the community of historians of science, its more enduring effects have probably been upon philosophy of science and, indeed, on public culture. -- Ian Hacking (Introductory essay)
As noted above, over the past 20 year, “paradigm shift” has become a bit shopworn, but still remains a convenient shorthand for many industries. The term saw a rebirth with the rise of the internet and as new paradigms were developed for publishing (both popular and scholarly, and especially journalism), education, commerce (including the rise of the “gig economy”), entertainment (particularly music and “television”), and many more.
At the end of Structure, Kuhn prophetically notes:
Since this view is also compatible with close observation of scientific life, there are strong arguments for employing it in attempts to solve the host of problems that still remain. (p. 173)
In reading Structure, I found a curious congruence between Kuhn’s concept of “Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories” (p. 66) and “The Response to Crisis” (p. 77), Sections VII and VIII of Structure, and the depiction of the “Seldon Crisis” in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (1951-53 for the original trilogy) series where a critical event leads to a rethinking and reorientation of the world.
For Asimov, a technological priesthood, or equivalent, was responsible for observing and mediating the paradigm shifts brought on by a Seldon Crisis. For science (and, more broadly if we are to apply the concepts outlined in Structure to other areas, acceptance of the shift and its implications are not so easy. Kuhn notes:
Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all. (p. 150)
To put it more bluntly, Kuhn quotes the remark by Max Planck:
And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography (1949), sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” (p. 151)
In Section XI: The Invisibility of Revolutions, Kuhn gives a number of examples of how the revolutionary nature of certain shifts become lost in the smoothing of the curve in writing of history:
Those misconstructions render revolutions invisible; the arrangement of the still visible material in science texts implies a process that, if it existed, would deny revolutions a function. (p. 140)
Science, and, by the extension of Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift to a multitude of areas, is much more punctuated that the linear accounts we often see, and that there is a different and more complex relationship between theories and facts:
And that means that theories too do not evolve piecemeal to fit facts that were there all the time. Rather, they emerge together with the facts they fit from a revolutionary reformulation of the preceding scientific tradition, a tradition within which the knowledge-mediated relationship between the scientist and nature was not quite the same. (p. 141)
If paradigm shifts to occur (which seems obvious), how do scientists move between the old and the new paradigms? In Section XII: The Resolution of Revolutions, Kuhn provides an answer.
Therefore, paradigm-testing occurs only after persistent failure to solve a noteworthy puzzle has given rise to crisis. And even then it occurs only after the sense of crisis has evoked an alternate candidate for paradigm. (p. 145)
He continues:
More is involved, however, than the incommensurability of standards. Since new paradigms are born from old ones, they ordinarily incorporate much of the vocabulary and apparatus, both conceptual and manipulative, that the traditional paradigm had previously employed. (p. 149)
With the concluding Section XIII: Progress Through Revolutions, Kuhn argues that the only progress in science is through revolutions:
When they [crisis] arise, the scientist is not, of course, equally well prepared. Even though prolonged crises are probably reflected in less rigid educational practice, scientific training is not well designed to produce the man who will easily discover a fresh approach.(p. 166).
And:
When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist’s perception of his discipline’s past. (p. 167).
For the revolution to be complete, the for the paradigm to shift, the new paradigm must possess two traits:
First, the new candidate must seem to resolve some outstanding and generally recognized problem that can be met in no other way. Second, the new paradigm must promise to preserve a relatively large part of the concrete problem-solving ability that has accrued to science through its predecessors. (p. 169).
The successful revolution, the transition to a new paradigm, contains a curious conundrum, scientific progress (and in many of the fields where the concept of paradigm shift is applied) lacks a teleological end; as Kuhn notes:
The developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings—a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything. (pp. 170-171).
The successful paradigm shift will change one’s perception of the past and understanding of the present, but, frustratingly, does not provide a path to the future or even a window to glimpse that future. And, just as Heraclitus said, “you cannot step twice into the same stream” (as quoted in Plato, Cratylus, 402a) the past perception of the world is annihilated with the new paradigm and “you can’t go home again.”
Concluding Thoughts
In the nearly 60 years since it was first published, Structure does show include artifacts of its time. As Hacking notes, “science” almost exclusively means physical science (still true today when it comes to funding of non-medical research). Though it should be noted, in the final section of Structure, Kuhn draws heavily on natural sciences for his concluding analogy. More jarring to the 2020 ear is the exclusive use of he/him/his. In 1962 gender inclusivity was rarely used (even by female writers such as Susan Sontag in her 1966 essay collection, Against Interpretation and Other Essays).
Likewise, Kuhn mostly embraces the moral neutrality of science, a stance already severely tried since the start of the Atomic Age. As Matthew C. Rees noted in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty” (The New Atlantis, Fall 2012).
One persisting trouble with Kuhn’s classic work is that its narrow focus left too many questions unanswered — including the question not just of what science is but of what science should be … Kuhn’s work is largely silent on the value of science and the wellbeing of society, and entirely silent on the wrongheadedness of blindly accepting scientific authority and discarding the philosophical questions that must always come first, even when we pretend otherwise.-- Rees (2012).
As a result, though new paradigms seldom or never possess all the capabilities of their predecessors, they usually preserve a great deal of the most concrete parts of past achievement and they always permit additional concrete problem-solutions besides. (p. 169)
I’ll close with one final and, at this time of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing crisis of global climate change:
One of the strongest, if still unwritten, rules of scientific life is the prohibition of appeals to heads of state or to the populace at large in matters scientific. (p. 168)
Indeed.
