Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times

by Steve Fuller

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the best known and most influential books of the twentieth century. Whether they adore or revile him, critics and fans alike have tended to agree on one Kuhn's ideas were revolutionary. But were they?

Steve Fuller argues that Kuhn actually held a profoundly conservative view of science and how one ought to study its history. Early on, Kuhn came under the influence of Harvard President James Bryant Conant (to whom Structure is dedicated), who had developed an educational program intended to help deflect Cold War unease over science's uncertain future by focusing on its illustrious past. Fuller argues that this rhetoric made its way into Structure, which Fuller sees as preserving and reinforcing the old view that science really is just a steady accumulation of truths about the world (once "paradigm shifts" are resolved).

Fuller suggests that Kuhn, deliberately or not, shared the tendency in Western culture to conceal possible negative effects of new knowledge from the general public. Because it insists on a difference between a history of science for scientists and one suited to historians, Fuller charges that Structure created the awkward divide that has led directly to the "Science Wars" and has stifled much innovative research. In conclusion, Fuller offers a way forward that rejects Kuhn's fixation on paradigms in favor of a conception of science as a social movement designed to empower society's traditionally disenfranchised elements.

Certain to be controversial, Thomas Kuhn must be read by anyone who has adopted, challenged, or otherwise engaged with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

"Structure will never look quite the same again after Fuller. In that sense, he has achieved one of the main aims of his ambitious and impressively executed project."—Jon Turney, Times Higher Education Supplement

"Philosophies like Kuhn's narrow the possible futures of inquiry by politically methodizing and taming them. More republican philosophies will leave the future open. Mr. Fuller has amply succeeded in his program of distinguishing the one from the other."—William R. Everdell, Washington Times

Genres: Philosophy

490 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Steve Fuller graduated from Columbia University in History & Sociology before gaining an MPhil from Cambridge and PhD from Pittsburgh (1985), both in History and Philosophy of Science. He currently holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick.

He is the founder of the research program of social epistemology. It is the name of a quarterly journal he founded with Taylor & Francis in 1987, as well as the first of his more than twenty books. His most recent work has been concerned with the future of humanity, or 'Humanity 2.0'.

Reviews

[Dan Lowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely dense, and perhaps ineffectively critical of Kuhn's theory in its approach of making the professor out to be a tool of Cold War Harvard's (and the USA's) paranoid ideology, inasmuch as that ideology has since become business as usual in the scientific community even after the era came to a close. If anything, post-Cold War Science is a validation of Kuhn beyond any of the supporting examples he himself derived from the systems developed before the Twentieth Century. Today, Kuhn's "normal science" is Science, and the auxiliary assumptions that Fuller reads between Kuhn's lines are indeed the nature of modern research and development. Whether or not Thomas Kuhn was instigated by the industrialization of scientific thought to purposely further it, the result -- and Kuhn's legacy -- is a success, at least for the duration of this paradigm.

That said, Fuller's admitted approach to the subject as a sociologist and from a historicist perspective are effective in painting a perspective of Kuhn's life and work below the surface, and, regardless of the extent to which it is valid in that respect, is a deep and informative portrayal of how the aims and means of the scientific community evolved leading into the Twentieth Century and throughout it. In laying out the groundwork for a historicist analysis, Fuller compiles a local history of science in the United States during the most influential part of its reign as a global power, and this compilation is useful in its own right.

[Jonathan]

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