History and Theory, 31 (3)

Although The Structure of Scientjfic Revolutions is one of the most influential books of this century, its author, Thomas Kuhn, is notorious for disavowing most of the consequences wrought by his text.  Insofar as these consequences have appeared “radical” or “antipositivist,” this article argues that they are very misleading, and that Kuhn’s complaints are therefore well placed.  Indeed, Kuhn unwittingly succeeded where Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology tried and failed, namely, to alleviate the anxieties of alienated academics and defensive policy-makers by teaching them that they could all profit from solving their own paradigmatic puzzles.  The influence of Structure is traced from the philosophy of science into the social sciences and science policy.  Special attention is paid to the import of the General Education in Science curriculum at Harvard, in which Kuhn taught for most of the period prior to writing Structure.  Harvard President James Conant had designed this curriculum in order to keep “pure science” in the good favor of the American public, in whose eyes it suffered after the use of the atomic bomb.  While Conant was keen to stress the distinctiveness of science from other social practices, Kuhn’s model seemed to provide a blueprint for reconstituting any practice as a science.  This enabled potentially antiscientific academics to become scientists themselves, thereby neutralizing any radical challenges to the ends of scientific inquiry.  The article concludes by reconstructing some of the inchoate possibilities for radical critique that Kuhn’s success preempted, and by making some suggestions for how they may be recovered in the present academic environment.

Alan Musgrave (on Kuhn’s denial of the radical views imputed to him) [1]

1. Cited in Paradigms and Revolutions, ed. Gary Gutting (Notre Dame, Ind., 1979), 51.

2. See, especially, Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987).

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movie Being There will serve as a “paradigm” for understanding the reception of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most consistently influential academic works of the twentieth century. [3]  Since 1962, when the book was first published, over one million copies have been sold worldwide, including translations into sixteen languages. [4]  Yet, from the first opportunity he was given (up to his most recent interview), Kuhn has disavowed all of the more exciting and radical theses imputed to him by friends and foes alike. [5]  Indeed, he has even endeavored to demonstrate by example, in his subsequent work, that he could not have been capable of anything so exciting and radical. [6]  It is doubtful that there has ever been another academic who has met the greatness thrust upon him with such apparent ingratitude. [7]  What is more remarkable, of course, is how, in full cognizance of Kuhn’s disclaimers, so much of the academic world has nevertheless felt compelled to position themselves with regard to his work. [8]  What might we learn from this very strange episode in the annals of scholarship?  But, first, a quick trip to the movies.

3. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1962], 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1970).

4. Figures cited in John Horgan, “Profile: Reluctant Revolutionary - Thomas S. Kuhn Unleashed ‘Paradigm’ on the World,” Scientific American (May 1991), 40.

5. This is perhaps the most consistent feature of Kuhn’s self-referential remarks.  See Kuhn, Structure, 174-210; “Reflections on My Critics,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge, Eng., 1970), 231-278; The Essential Tension (Chicago, 1977), xxi- xxiii, 293; Horgan, 40.

6. See, in particular, the reception of his last sustained historical work: Thomas Kuhn, Black-Body Radiation and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (Oxford, 1978).  A sense of the disappointment of the reviewers is captured by the title of the major symposium devoted to the book: Martin Klein, Abner Shimony, and Trevor Pinch, “Paradigm Lost?” Isis 70 (1979), 429-440.  This book seems to have pleased only positivists, internal historians of science, and practicing physicists.

7. Horgan quotes Kuhn as saying, “I’ve often said I’m much fonder of my critics than my fans” (49). Karl Marx ran a close second to Kuhn in his desire to disown his admirers.

8. Many of the luminous who have so positioned themselves are collected in Gutting.  However, the most artful “Kuhnotropist” is undoubtedly the sociologist Robert Merton, who tries to demystify any aura of genius that might surround Kuhn by showing that the success of Structure can be easily explained by Merton’s own “principle of cumulative advantage.”  (The explanation of Merton’s own genius in arriving at this principle will no doubt be tackled by some future historian, hopefully not at the expense of one of Merton’s own theories!)  See Robert Merton, The Sociology of Science: An Episodic Memoir (Carbondale, 111., 1977), 71-108.  I myself have indulged in shameless Kuhnotropistry, as evidenced in Steve Fuller, Social Epistemology (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), 85-89, 97- 98, 111-119, 142-169, 219-224.  This essay is partly in atonement for my errant ways.

The first extensive critical review of Structure is the one that emblazoned Kuhn in the minds of philosophers.  Appearing in one of America’s premier journals, it was written by a young, Harvard- trained philosopher who had already published several articles showing that the logical analysis of language championed by the logical positivists did not do justice even to the very science they cherished most, physics.  Like all language-games, Dudley Shapere argued, physics too has an irreducibly pragmatic character that can be understood only by a historically sensitized version of ordinary language philosophy, that is, a study of what members of a particular physics community meant in the context of their utterance. [9]  Although Shapere thought that Stephen Toulmin had made many of Kuhn’s points - and in a philosophically more perspicacious manner - perhaps a decade earlier, the express generality of Structure’s account of science and its innocence of any formal logical apparatus made it an apt vehicle for enumerating the full range of omissions from the positivist account of science. [10]  More-

9. Dudley Shapere, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Philosophical Review 73 (1964), 383-394.  See also Shapere, “Meaning and Scientific Change,” in Mind and Cosmos, ed. R. Colodny (Pittsburgh, 1966), 41-85.  Shapere’s Harvard mentor was Morton White, whose own work strongly anticipated the “pragmatist turn” associated nowadays with Richard Rorty.  See, especially, Morton White, Towards a Reunion in Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1956).  White’s attempt to encompass analytic and continental philosophy under a comprehensive pragmatism was overshadowed in his day by Quine’s more focused and largely internal critique of positivism’s conception of language.  Among Shapere’s early Harvard-influenced essays include “Mathematical Ideals and Metaphysical Concepts,” Philosophical Review 69(1960), 376-385; “Space, Time, and Language,” in Philosophy of Science: The Delaware Seminar, ed. B. Baumrin (New York, 1963), 139-170.

10. Shapere cites Toulmin’s two books on the philosophy of science which predate Kuhn’s: Stephen Toulmin, The Philosophy of Science: An Introduction (London, 1951); Foresight and Understanding (London, 1961).  Toulmin shares with Kuhn an early background in physics and shares with Shapere philosophical training in linguistic analysis.  Both of Toulmin’s books went into several editions and (unlike Structure) were picked up by commercial publishers.  And while Toulmin seemed to attract a wide audience (for example, both Ernest Nagel and Jacques Barzun endorsed his books), I would suggest that the reason he never garnered Kuhn-like attention was that he wrote in the understated Wittgensteinian style of perceptively remarking on simple examples without issuing anything that might smack of a “theory” or a “scheme.”

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over, by making Kuhn out to be proposing an “anti-positivist” viewpoint, Shapere made himself appear less an opponent than a mediator of opposing camps.  Thus, Shapere could demonstrate the value of philosophical sophistication in moderating the more wild-eyed claims of historians overly impressed with the remoteness of the past. [11]

11. This was a recurrent theme in the work of Norwood Russell Hanson, who was the most visible American standard-bearer for the emerging field of “History and Philosophy of Science” from the publication of Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge, Eng., 1958) to his death a decade later.  Unlike the other philosophers considered here (including Kuhn), Hanson frequently appeared in the pages of American newsstand periodicals (especially the Nation) during the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Even pages from Patterns were excerpted in The Saturday Review.  In addition, Hanson helped established History & Philosophy of Science programs at Cambridge, Indiana, and Yale Universities.  Of the figures discussed here, Hanson seemed to be the most preoccupied with defining and crossing disciplinary boundaries.  Characteristic work in this vein include “Scientists and Logicians: A Confrontation,” Science 138 (1962), 1311-1314; “The Irrelevance of History of Science to Philosophy of Science,” in What I Do Not Believe and Other Essays, ed. S. Toulmin and H. Woolf (Dordrecht, 1971), 274-287.

12. The canonical presentation of the story Shapere wanted his audience to believe is The Stru­ture of Scientific Theories, ed. Frederick Suppe [1973], 2nd ed. (Urbana, 1977), 3-232.  In an afterword to the second edition, Suppe predicted that Kuhn’s influence was waning and that the future of historicist philosophy of science belonged to Shapere and Toulmin.  In retrospect, the most striking omission from Suppe’s 800-page tome is any reference to the person who turned out to carry the torch for historicism, Larry Laudan, whose Progress and Its Problems (Berkeley, 1977) was published the very same year as the second edition of Suppe’s book.  Chapter seven of Laudan’s book threw down the gauntlet at the emerging field Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, which (see below) stands in an interesting relation to Kuhn.

13. The Carnap-Kuhn correspondence is analyzed in George Reisch, “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?” Philosophy of Science 58 (1991), 264-277.

14. For Kuhn’s increasing tendency to embrace positivism, see Suppe, 647.  Also, contrast Kuhn’s early disavowal of any connection to the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Kuhn, Essential Tension, xxi-xxii), with Kuhn’s eagerness to insert himself in recent philosophical debates in semantics and the theory of reference (Kuhn, “Possible Worlds in History of Science,” in Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences, ed. S. Allen [Berlin, 1989], 9-32).  Finally, consider Kuhn’s accommodating posture to the criticisms made of his work by such positivistically inclined philosophers as Carl Hempel and Wesley Salmon: Kuhn, “Rationality and Theory Choice,” Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983), 563-570.

understand the overarching significance of Structure, especially the sorts of projects it has helped and impeded, we need to start taking seriously that Kuhn’s book constituted, pace Shapere, less a revolt against positivism than a continuation of positivism by other means.  However, this is not to deny to Shapere the honor of having turned Kuhn into an object of philosophical fascination by parceling out Structure into analysis-sized problems of “meaning-variance,” “theory-laden observation,” and “absolute presuppositions.”  In this way, Shapere enabled Kuhn to become routinely discussed in the same breath as the ascendant philosophers of science of his generation, especially Toulmin, Russ Hanson, and, of course, Paul Feyerabend. [15]

In the Anglo-American philosophical community of the early 1960s, Shapere’s constructed cohort of “historicists” were still perceived - to refashion a bit of Kuhn - as mere anomaly-mongers, proffering elaborate counterexamples to positivist accounts of explanation and confirmation, anomalies which, once stripped of their historical superfluities, would be rendered tractable to logical analysis. [16]   The idea that the historicists might replace or succeed the positivists in a common lineage did not appear persuasive (or at least not an item discussed in the main philosophy of science journals) until Imre Lakatos published a volume of papers from a symposium held during the 1965 meeting of the International Congress of Logic, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Science, which was hosted by Lakatos’s home institution, the London School of Economics. [17]  The symposium in question was officially devoted to the implications of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, but Lakatos was keen on using the

15. Kuhn, Toulmin, and Imre Lakatos (to be discussed below) were all born in 1922.  Hanson and Feyerabend were born in 1924.  Shapere aside, the clustering of these figures as an intellectual cohort is largely a product of the next generation of philosophers, such as Ian Hacking, Larry Laudan, Harold Brown, Fred Suppe, and Peter Machamer, all of whom were born around 1940.  See, especially, Machamer, “Understanding Scientific Change,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Sciences (1975), 373-381; Brown, Perception, Theory, and Commitment: The New Philosophy of Science (Chicago, 1977).  The latter, a textbook, received Kuhn’s official endorsement.

16. Of all the historicists, this unflattering image stuck most readily to Feyerabend, who in 1964 was most famous for challenging Ernest Nagel’s model of explanation by reduction: Paul Feyerabend, “Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism,” in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. H. Feigl and G. Maxwell (Minneapolis, 1962), III, 28-97.  In retrospect, this challenge is normally regarded as the first time the authority of the historical record had successfully opposed a formal logical model.  Although few philosophers relinquished the goal of reductionism at that time, rather than simply ignoring Feyerabend as raising irrelevant concerns, they endeavored to accommodate Feyerabend’s challenge within the model.  See Kenneth Schaffner, “Approaches to Reduction,” Philosophy of Science 34 (1967), 137-147.  During most of the 1960s, Kuhn’s name typically appeared in philosophy journals as a corroborating footnote to a discussion of Feyerabend’s challenges.  It is important to remember that Feyerabend did not consolidate his own philosophy of science into a readily available text until the mid-1970s: Feyerabend, Against Method (London, 1975).  Before that time, Feyerabend was taken to be a radical philosopher of physics, whose views had interesting implications for the philosophy of science more generally.  An apt comparison in our own day is with Arthur Fine, whom Joseph Rouse expects will come out of the closet shortly.  See Rouse, “The Politics of Postmodern Philosophy of Science,” Philosophy of Science 58 (1991), 607-627.

17. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge, Eng., 1970).

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forum to present himself as the heir-apparent to Popper’s chair. [18]  However, as fate would have it, Kuhn stole the show, with his contribution to a Popper Festschrift being the one in terms of which all the other speakers - including Popper, Lakatos, Toulmin, and Feyerabend  - rewrote their papers. [19]  Thus, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, despite the Popperism packed into its title, is normally taught in seminars today as a repository of “famous responses to Kuhn.”  And, after its publication, Kuhn starts to get routinely cited in order to legitimate various developments across the humanities and social sciences.  [20]

18. Thus, Lakatos’s most famous and sustained post-dissertation work appeared in this volume: “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Criticism, 91-196.  A relevant point here is that Popper was awarded his chair at the LSE in the “Logic of the Social Sciences,” based largely on such wartime works as The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies.  Not surprisingly, Popper’s main lobbyist for a permanent post at the LSE had been the liberal economist Friedrich von Hayek.  The seminal work in methodology for which Popper is perhaps best known today, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, was a product of his younger days in Austria and was not translated into English until 1959.  Thus, Popper’s reputation as a general philosopher of science in the English-speaking world emerged as part of “the revolt against positivism,” even though Carnap (again!) supported the original publication of Popper’s book in the series associated with the positivist journal, Erkenntnis.

19. Thomas Kuhn, “Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?” in Criticism, 1-23.

20. The best of these papers are compiled in Gutting.  The publication of Criticism coincided with the second edition of Structure, in which Kuhn answered some of his critics in a postscript.  As one might expect, Kuhn has himself consistently denied that his model of scientific change applies to the humanities and social sciences.  In fact, Kuhn had this to say when invited to a conference in which Structure was discussed as one of the major advances of twentieth century social sciences: “I know a great deal less than I should, and in any case virtually nothing at all, about the social sciences and I will not create confusion by bluffing it” (letter to Karl Deutsch, cited in Advances in the Social Sciences, 1900-1980, ed. K. Deutsch, A. Markovits, and J. Platt [Cambridge, Mass., 1986], 278).

21. “Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, 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” (Kuhn, Structure, 151).

22. At the time, Kuhn’s fondness for the imagery of religious conversion raised the most Popperian hackles, as it seemed to imply that scientific revolutions could not be resolved rationally precisely because they involved life decisions of the utmost importance.  Ironically the Popperians actually agreed with the positivists and Kuhn that decisions concerning the “absolute presuppositions” of one’s practice are a matter of free existential choice.  (I imagine that neo-Kantianism, especially as filtered by Max Weber, is the source of this sentiment.  See Robert Proctor, Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge [Cambridge, Mass., 1991], 15 1-154.)  However, for that very reason, Popperians have held that the merits of such a choice must be evaluated in terms of its consequences (the extent of which are, unfortunately, rarely specified).  Thus, rational beings act so as to be constrained only by the anticipation that they may want to reverse that decision at a later date, if the consequences of their actions do not turn out as planned.  An ethic of “piecemeal engineering” (Popper’s phrase) naturally follows from this imperative.  Ironically, in the same year that Kuhn’s book was published, a work by a student of Popper’s was published, initially to more fanfare, which argued against the irrationality implicit in the refusal of Liberal Protestant theologians to contest absolute presuppositions: See W. W. Bartley III, The Retreat to Commitment [1962], 2nd ed. (La Salle, Ill., 1984).

23. The most famous was probably the German Positivismusstreit that pitted Popperian social and economic theorists (including Ralf Dahrendorf and Hans Albert) against the Frankfurt School, especially Theodor Adorno and his understudy, Jurgen Habermas, who rose to prominence in the following decade for his skill in mediating and synthesizing alternatives forms of rationality.  See The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, ed. Theodor Adorno (London, 1976).  Another noteworthy rationality debate, confined largely to Britain and its spheres of influence, concerned whether there were cross-culturally valid, universal standards of reasoning.  It pitted against one another noted anthropologists and philosophers, such as Ernest Gellner, Peter Winch, Alasdair Maclntyre, Charles Taylor, Steven Lukes, and Ian Jarvie.  See Rationality, ed. Bryan Wilson (Oxford, 1970).

24. In its early days, the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) was known as the “Strong Programme” to distinguish its own methodological imperatives from those of the founder of the sociology of knowledge, Karl Mannheim, who argued that the rational methodology of the natural sciences precluded them from sociological explanation.  Since the early 1970s, when SSK first made its presence felt from the Science Studies Unit at Edinburgh University, a burgeoning and diverse body of empirical research has been promoted in departments of “Science & Technology Studies” in Europe, Australia, and increasingly America.  The “Edinburgh School” made the first institutional attempt to integrate history, philosophy, and sociology of science - the three fields that Kuhn was seen as having brought together in Structure.  The canonical formulation is David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London, 1976).  Barry Barnes has drawn detailed connections between Kuhn’s work and subsequent developments in SSK in T. S. Kuhn and Social Science (Oxford, 1982).

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When one looks at the typical cases of “irrationality” that worry Popperians and other philosophers so much, they are not associated with mass hysteria or other undisciplined forms of behavior.  Rather, irrationality is attached to a certain complacency or inertia that arises from one’s expectations being repeatedly confirmed or challenged only in ways that are easily accommodated or rebuffed.  Rationality, then, is the turn of mind that resists habit, typically by criticism and actively confounding expectations. [26]  Kuhn’s apparent satisfaction with the preponderance of science being unreflective puzzle-solving is the clearest indication to his philosophical critics that Structure presents an “irrationalist” picture of the scientific enterprise. [27]  One cannot underestimate the extent to which this Enlightenment idea of “Reason” triumphing over superstition and tradition remains a ready source of philosophical self-imagery even in our own day. [28]  However, in the heat of philosophical debate, this eighteenth-century notion has been periodically confused with a conception of reason that came to the fore in the nineteenth century, especially with the rise of positivism.  Here “reason” is a governing principle, one that regulates the growth of knowledge by directing and measuring the path of inquiry.  Presupposed is that, without such a governing principle, human energies would be dissipated into random motion.  In that case, irrationality would indeed be akin to mass hysteria. [29]

25. A compilation of the generally acrimonious proceedings is The Rationality Debates: The Sociological Turn, ed. James Robert Brown (Dordrecht, 1984).

26. In fact, the distinguished Popperian anthropologist Ernest Gellner bases his entire philosophy of history on the idea that, because logical coherence is inversely related to social coherence, any attempt to achieve a more logically comprehensive picture of reality has required challenging the normative integrity of one’s own social order.  See Ernest Geliner, Plough, Sword, and Book (Chicago, 1989).  It should be clear that I concur with the spirit of Geilner’s thesis, if not its exact letter.

27. See Popper’s and Feyerabend’s comments in Criticism: Karl Popper, “Normal Science and Its Dangers,” 51—58; Paul Feyerabend, “Consolations for the Specialist,” 197-229.

28. What has changed over the last two centuries is the metaphysical warrant for Enlightenment.  There is less of an appeal to Reason as the essence of human nature (though it remains in Jürgen Habermas, today’s leading Enlightenment thinker).  For a non-essentialist version, see Steve Fuller, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge (Madison, Wisc., 1992).

29. On the changing conceptions of reason, see Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 1971).  Kuhn is not alone in confusing the two senses of reason.  Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature refutes the notion of [“foundationalism,” which is tied directly to the nineteenth-century conception, but part three (and his subsequent work) indicates that he intends to have buried the eighteenth-century conception as well.  Rorty’s role as an entry point for American understandings of recent French philosophical critiques of reason has compounded the confusion.  Thus, while it is common for both friends and foes of “postmodernism” to lump Jacques Derrida’s On Grammatology and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition as part of the same general antirationalist tendency, Derrida specifically aims to undermine the positivist conception of reason by engaging in an Enlightenment-like interrogation of that conception, whereas Lyotard indicts the Enlightenment conception of reason precisely for its totalizing sense of critique, which has destructive consequences for the heterogeneity of knowledge production that marks our times.]

HHC: [bracketed] displayed on page 249 of original.

30. Lakatos, “Falsification,” 178.

31. See Imre Lakatos, “History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions,” in Scientific Revolutions, ed. I. Hacking (Oxford, 1981), 108, n. 2.  Among historicist philosophers of science, Toulmin has been the most astute in locating the origins of prescriptivist approaches to philosophy in legislation.  He sees the task of setting up ideals and standards for comparing the claims of incommensurable theories as modeled on the law-making needed for a jurisdiction that encompasses communities with quite disparate local customs and entitlements:  What Socrates did in theory, Solon had already done in practice.  See Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding (Princeton 1972), 86-87.  Explicitly drawing on Toulmin, Donald Kelley has recently extended this thesis to include the social sciences as further theorizations of the legislative impulse.  See Kelley, The Human Measure (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

32. The legislator/judge distinction goes back to Kant’s distinction between regulative and constitutive principles of reason that applied, respectively, to transcendental and empirical reality.  With regard to the comment on “accountants,” since Lakatos’s death in 1974, the shift from prescription to evaluation has become more pronounced in the philosophy of science, as increasing numbers of younger philosophers have become adept in the details of the special sciences (especially physics and biology).  This adeptness has enabled them to function as referees for the intramural disputes of the sciences in question.  The intellectual godfather for much of this generation is David Hull, a philosopher of biology who served for several years as editor of the journal Systematic Zoology.  The philosophical lessons from that experience are drawn in David Hull, Science as a Process (Chicago, 1988).

Lakatos never managed to stem this tide, though an interest in reasserting prescriptivism in the philosophy of science might ultimately explain his distinctive doctrines concerning the history of science. [33]

33. Certainly, Lakatos’s most notorious contribution to philosophy has been his bald-faced endorsement of rational reconstructions of the history of science, however much they may deviate from the actual historical record.  Whatever else one may wish to say about such reconstructions, they offer a sense of how the history would have gone, had it unfolded according to the philosopher’s favorite rules.  If philosophers can no longer prescribe the course of knowledge production, the next best thing may be to fantasize how much better it would have been had they been allowed to do so!

34. What are “value-free” and “theory-neutral” are the possible observations that deductively follow from the chosen theoretical language, and their testability by a method whose validity does not depend on whether the tested theory is true or false.

(3) In this way, reason is successfully contained, or relativized, to a paradigm, but inexpressible between paradigms.  Thus, there is no place for a critical form of rationality that is independent from, let alone oppositional to, the dominant epistemic practices of the time. [35]

35. Thus, while one can understand Sandra Harding’s reliance on Kuhn to refute positivism, Kuhn’s work itself provides little comfort to her own “standpoint epistemology,” which implies a privileged critical perspective for groups marginalized from the dominant forms of power in society.  See Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, 1986), 197-210.

innovation became one more thing regulated by a state planning board. [36]  A similar story has been told about the diminished prospects for scientific revolutions in the future, given the heavy personnel and material investments that have already been made in current forms of “Big Science.” [37]  The question that needs to be asked of these gloomy forecasts is whether they are anything more than an artifact of an account of science that does not recognize a place for rational criticism outside of the existing epistemic power structure. [38]

36. The locus classicus of this view is Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, 1942).

37. A telling point here is that, in recent years, with the exception of Feyerabend, no philosophical attention has been lavished on the idea that science should do something other than it already is.  Since Kuhn’s work, philosophers of science have been in virtually complete agreement about which instances of historical and contemporary science deserve praise or blame.  Nowadays the debates turn on the best way to account for the agreed upon cases.  See, for example, Scientific Realism, ed. Jarrett Leplin (Berkeley, 1984).  Contrary to received wisdom, Structure did not so much “refute” the concept of progress in science as to change the subject to one in which the philosophers disagreed only over the finer points of semantics.  For a sophisticated account justifying the slowdown of science, influenced in part by Kuhn, see Nicholas Rescher, The Limits of Science (Berkeley, 1984).

38. One brave attempt to lay down an external rational critique of Big Science is Harry Redner, The Ends of Science (Boulder, Cob., 1987), esp. 252-253 (a severe critique of Kuhn).  As Sujatha Raman has pointed out to me, an emerging model for rationally criticizing Big Science from outside the epistemic power structure is post-Cold War “downsizing” and “conversion” of the U.S. military establishment, which is currently (albeit painfully) being negotiated by career soldiers and civilian bureaucrats.  Here, too, one finds the rhetoric of “great risk” that supposedly attends any attempt to alter radically the institution’s scale and scope.

39. Several philosophers have noticed that Feyerabend presupposes the positivists’ rather limited conception of rationality so that he appears more outrageous than he really is.  See Arne Naess, “Paul Feyerabend - A Green Hero?,” ed. Gonzalo Munevar, Beyond Reason: Essays on the Philosophy of Paul K. Feyerabend (Dordrecht, 1991), 403-416.  It is worth recalling that, of all the Popperians, Feyerabend was the only one whose early reputation was built as a technical critic of positivism, which suggests that he may have ingested more positivist dogma than he and his readers have realized.  See note 16.

listen to reason, but that they listen all too well!  Notice here that reason is presumed to be always “internal” to science.  The only politically appropriate responses to Big Science, then, are forced entries, withdrawals of support, and displays of irreverence - all, in one way or other, violent departures from reason. [40]

40. Dominique Lecourt, philosophical advocate of “proletarian science” during the French student uprising of 1968, has recently bemoaned the fact that inquiries into the ends of science have become monopolized by critics strongly influenced by the right-wing irrationalism of Spengler and Heidegger.  Even when the critics have had left-wing pretensions, as in the case of the Green movement, they suppose that science can only be opposed by engaging in practices contrary to those of science.  Feyerabend has certainly contributed to this sentiment in Europe, which goes against the self-critical rationalism of both Popperians and Marxists, despite their disagreement on so many other matters.  However, as Lecourt rightly observes, these rationalists have taken today’s “technoscience” as having greater facticity than “nature” itself.  See Lecourt, “The Scientist and the Citizen: A Critique of Technoscience,” Philosophical Forum 23 (1992), 174-178.

41. I develop this point in Fuller, Social Epistemology, 99-116; and in Steve Fuller, Philosophy of Science and Its Discontents (Boulder, Cob., 1989), 65-70.

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occur quite unradically, indeed, invisibly.  However, conspicuously absent from Kuhn’s account is any discussion of how argumentation may facilitate this transition.  The absence is “conspicuous” because the other historicists in Shapere’s original cohort - Hanson, Toulmin, and Feyerabend - explicitly made argumentation central to an understanding of how scientific change occurs. [42]  Despite their differing emphases on this process, they made a point of distancing what they mean by “argument” from formal logical deduction, in order to convey the idea that the merits of alternative research agendas, or theories, are not already implicit in their ideal formulations, just waiting to be deduced; rather the theories’ respective merits do not become evident until they are articulated publicly in terms of one another. [43]  Of course, there are all too many instances in the history of science when the relevant rivals have not directly confronted one another, and so their incommensurability remained until the Planck Effect kicked in.  However, a priori there is no reason to take this state of affairs as incorrigible.  But was an alternative normative account available in the 1960s?  The answer is that crucial elements were available, but they were not brought together into a coherent and persuasive whole.  The key lies in following the career of rhetoric during this period; here our main witness is Toulmin.

42. Credit for first realizing this point about Kuhn goes to Israel Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity (Indianapolis, 1967).

43. Unlike the positivists, who portrayed scientific theories as generating predictions that are then tested against observations, both Toulmin and Hanson describe scientists more like judges who look for the rule (theory) under which the case at hand (observation) can be best subsumed.  This reflects a shift in philosophical thinking from confirmation to explanation as the main business of science.  Philosophers of science, then, presumably are like the legislators who construct (discover?) the rules by which the contesting interpretations of the case can be resolved.  For example, in Patterns of Discovery Hanson follows a strategy, familiar in constitutional law, of eliciting legislative principles from the conflict that arises from judges deciding “hard cases” - in Hanson’s case, concerning the motion of elementary particles.  As legal theorists are wont to argue, Hanson too claims that if the principles he has elicited apply for this hard case, then a fortiori they apply to the more routine cases of scientific discovery as well.  See Hanson, Patterns, 2-3.  By contrast, the positivists focused on the logic of these more routine cases, which are essentially generated as observations by the dominant scientific theory.  Kuhn stands with the positivists on seeing theory-driven research as mostly “mopping up operations,” but occasionally turning up Hanson-like phenomena, which are best seen as “anomalies.”

44. Stephen Toulmin, The Place of Reason in Ethics (Cambridge, Eng., 1950).

in which “reality” defines a pragmatic limit to a particular inquiry, the moment when its participants no longer feel the need to pursue a matter any further.  Of course, the inquiry can later be reopened, with “reality” then being the subsequent point of closure.  Indeed, science has institutional mechanisms to ensure that that happens. [45]  Ethics, Toulmin observed, is not so endowed, but that is only a matter of convention, one perhaps worth revising so that people are not led to think - as the positivist view might suggest - that important value issues are purely personal matters.  Toulmin made more explicit his endorsement of a rhetorically based, anti-positivist conception of reason in The Uses of Argument, a book that started to become very influential among Speech Communication scholars in the late 1960s. [46]  However, when it was first published in 1958, Toulmin’s wholesale rejection of the concept of formal validity - the idea that there are forms of argument that are rationally acceptable regardless of their content - made the book very unpopular with its primary audience, philosophers, even among those who recognized that formal logic provided an inadequate model of human reasoning. [47]

The point of this brief excursus into Toulmin’s early thought is that, unlike Kuhn and the positivists, Toulmin never drew a sharp line between reasoning about empirical and normative matters.  In fact, he was so keen on eliminating any such distinction that he challenged its ultimate philosophical basis, the Humean contrast between empirical content and logical form.  However, Toulmin never worked out an alternative conception of scientific reasoning.  True, he actually predated Kuhn’s use of “paradigm” by one year, using the word to mean an “ideal of natural order” in terms of which the adequacy of particular explanations would be judged.  So defined, a paradigm anchored scientific argument by establishing a presumption, say in the case of Newtonian mechanics, in favor of bodies moving rectilinearly unless impeded. [48]  Clearly, Toulmin here was groping toward a theory of rhetoric, with his use of “paradigm” recognizably falling under the rhetorical category of topos. [49]   However, crucially lacking from Toulmin’s account was an understanding of how radical

45. Toulmin would later call practices of this sort “compact.”  See Human Understanding, 378ff. Toulmin’s discussion of compactness has influenced the interest that Sociologists of Scientific Knowledge have had with how scientific disputes are “closed” and then “reopened.”  See Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, Frames of Meaning (London, 1982); Harry Collins, Changing Order (London, 1985).

46. Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge, Eng., 1958).  The recent spate of interest in Toulmin among German philosophers is due to the incorporation of Toulmin’s ideas about validity in the theory of communicative action put forth by Jurgen Habermas, who, in turn, learned of Toubmin’s work from the Speech Communication people.  The canonical status of Toulmin’s work in this field is symbolized by a place in Handbook of Argumentation Theory, ed. F. van Eemeren, R. Grootendorst, and T. Kruiger (Amsterdam, 1987), 162-207.

47. See, especially, Peter Manicas, “On Toulmin’s Contribution to Logic and Argumentation,” Journal of the American Forensic Association 3 (1966), 83-94.

48. Toubmin, Foresight, 56.

49. The topoi surrounding the breakdown of a paradigm have been explored more recently in Kenneth Zagacki and William Keith, “Rhetoric, Topoi, and Scientific Revolution,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992), 59-78.

change could arise in the course of argument: How can people operating with incommensurable paradigms come to see one another as mutually relevant audiences worthy of sustained attention and perhaps even mutual incorporation?  Toulmin failed to answer this difficult question because he underestimated the need for arguers (including himself, as aspiring revolutionary) to build ethos with their audiences.  There are no captive audiences in science.  If the Planck Effect is as prevalent as Kuhn maintained, then obviously scientists can never take for granted that colleagues holding contrary views will listen to them.  Traditionally, the function of ethos in rhetoric has been to build community from audiences with little, if any, prior common cause.  The need for the different classes of a society to join forces in times of war would thus be a typical test of a leader’s ethos. 50   While this aspect of rhetoric would gain renewed prominence in the l970s, with the reissuance of the works of Kenneth Burke, it was quite the opposite of what philosophers especially, but even some rhetoricians, had only a decade earlier taken the scope of rhetoric to be. [51]

50. The question of leadership is especially acute in any philosophical attempt to revive a prescriptivist approach to science.  One traditional rhetorical source of ethos is kairos, that is, a pressing occasion that calls for leadership.  But what can be made so pressing that scientists listen to a philosopher - even if all the philosopher says is that they should listen to each other?  Unfortunately, the prospect of philosophical legislation continues to carry the old Hobbesian baggage of a sovereign legislator who not only takes the initiative to propose laws but also has the will to enforce them.

51. Among noted rhetoricians, for example, I. A. Richards saw the academic study of rhetoric as a fellow-traveler of logical positivism, in its ability to identify and correct misunderstandings.  See Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1936).

On matters of rhetoric in science, it might seem appropriate to return to Feyerabend, whose study of Galileo’s rhetoric is the case in point for the anarchistic epistemology advanced in Against Method.  However, while Feyerabend grants rhetoric a more prominent place in exemplary episodes of scientific reasoning than the positivists were inclined to recognize, he nevertheless continues to portray rhetoric in the same negative light as the positivists saw it.  After all, on Feyerabend’s account, Galileo used rhetoric to cover up basic gaps in his arguments, which over the centuries philosophers have supplemented with idealized premises; however, these gaps did not escape the gaze of Galileo’s Jesuit Inquisitors.  The outrageousness of Feyerabend’s account pertains to the short and long term of Galileo’s fate.  In the short term, the Inquisitors, normally the “bad guys” in positivist historiography, are presented as having offered cogent methodological criticisms of Galileo (much like the positivists themselves would).  Yet, in the long term, Galileo turns out to have gotten closer to our physics than the Inquisitors with their methodological niceties.  The Feyerabendian moral, then, is that the positivists mistake rhetoric for method, but method doesn’t win, either: reality does - and that’s something that transcends both crafty rhetoric and rigorous method.  If this conclusion seems to mix truth and long-term survival, it is because Feyerabend shares with Kuhn a certain unexplained fondness for Darwinian accounts of knowledge growth.

52. Kuhn’s likely source for an Aristotelian perspective on scientific change was Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1925), a popularization of process metaphysics that enabled Whitehead to portray twentieth-century revolutions in physics as a neo-Aristotelian revival.

53. Kuhn, Structure, 167.

54. Three recent textbooks that attempt to integrate SSK concerns with larger issues of critical science policy, often within a broader sociological or political economy perspective are: Stephen Yearbey, Science, Technology, and Social Change (London, 1988); Andrew Webster, Science, Technology, and Society (London, 1991); John Street, The Politics of Technology (London, 1992).  Note that all the authors are British and draw their examples from the U.K. and Europe, which have independent traditions of science criticism, deriving mostly from Marxism and the Ecology movement.  In all three books, SSK is presented in separate chapters from those devoted to science criticism and policy, and often the attempt at integration is perfunctory.  For an astute critique of Yearley, whose own research most clearly straddles the divide, see Govindan Parayil, “Review of Yearley,” Social Epistemology 6 (1992), 57-64.

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provides what might be called an “internal sociology” of normal science, in which the SSK practitioner tries to understand the set of practices that constitute what the scientists themselves identify as their lifeworld, a laboratory being the typical site for SSK inquiry.  However, SSK practitioners suspend any technical knowledge that they might have of the practices under study.  The subversive epistemological consequence, already noted, is that the SSK practitioner often notices things, especially incongruities between word and deed, that escape the practicing scientist’s attention.  But the subversion only goes so far, as SSK’s own critical potential is truncated by a symmetrical tendency to suspend any technical knowledge of the social sciences that SSK practitioners might bring to bear to their case.  While such methodological asceticism is not without precedent in the sociological literature, it has had the effect of precluding political factors that do not explicitly enter the scientists’ own deliberations. [55]  For example, SSK practitioners employ discourse-analytic techniques to reveal the various voices in a language game played by a community of scientists, but they do not use such techniques to engage in an ideology critique of science that appeals to factors that sustain the game but which transcend the scientists’ control or awareness.  This stunted sense of critique has been a constant source of frustration for Marxist and feminist science critics, whose relations with SSK have been chilly, to say the least. [56]

55. One methodological precedent for SSK’s practice from American sociology is “grounded theory,” as put forward in Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research Practice (Chicago, 1967).

56. Typical in this regard are Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power (Minneapolis, 1988) and Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca, 1991).  Kuhn is explicitly charged with retarding the sociologization of science in Sal Restivo, “The Myth of the Kuhnian Revolution,” in Sociological Theory, ed. R. Collins (San Francisco, 1983), 293-305.

57. Although Kuhn’s pedagogical orientation is due primarily to his experience in the Harvard General Education in Science curriculum, as informed through the lectures of Jerome Bruner, he was also influenced by Wittgenstein and Popper, both of whom were trained as secondary school teachers, an aspect of their lives that carried over to their philosophical practice.  For a penetrating analysis that should perhaps be read alongside the one I provide below, see W. W. Bartley III, “Theory of Language and Philosophy of Science as Instruments of Educational Reform: Wittgenstein and Popper as Austrian Schoolteachers,” in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science XIV, ed. R. Cohen and M. Wartofksy (Dordrecht, 1974), 307-337.

58. An oversocialized conception of people sees individuals entirely in terms of their group characteristics, as in the Kuhnian tendency to see all scientists who work in a given paradigm as sharing the same mindset.  In effect, this conception collapses the micro-macro distinction in sociological theory by making it seem that an entire community can be studied simply by regarding one of its members.  Not surprisingly, oversocializationists tend to regard acculturation - the acqui-[sition of membership rights - as the most important social process.  But upon admission to the group, sociology ends and individual discretion begins - at least, that is the story that will be told once Kuhn’s ties to Polanyi and the scientific community are introduced.]

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What does the group collectively see as its goals; what deviations, individual or collective, will it tolerate; and how does it control the impermissible aberration?  A fuller understanding of science will depend on answers to other sorts of questions as well, but there is no area in which work is so badly needed.  Scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all.  To understand it we shall need to know the special characteristics of the groups that create and use it. [59]

The urgency with which Kuhn recommends the study of science as a unique and autonomous enterprise prompted Feyerabend to wonder whether Kuhn was not implicitly smuggling a prescription under his description: Should Kuhn be taken to mean that science ought to be maintained in its current state? [60]  Kuhn responded, Aristotle-like, that by describing the implicit normative structure of science, we would acquire a better sense of how best to govern science. [61]  While some have taken Kuhn to have thereby thumbed his nose at the is-ought distinction, I take him to have simply confirmed Feyerabend’s suspicion - that Kuhn wants to understand science in order to determine what it will take to maintain its status quo. [62]

59. Kuhn, Structure, 209-210.

60. Feyerabend, “Consolations,” 202-203.

61. Kuhn, “Reflections,” 237.

62. For a charitably radical view of Kuhn on this point, see Jerome Ravetz, “Ideological Commitments in the Philosophy of Science,” in Munevar, ed., 355-378.

63. David Hollinger, “Free Enterprise and Free Inquiry: The Emergence of Laissez-Faire Communitarianism in the Ideology of Science in the United States,” New Literary History 21(1990), 897-919.

64. I portray the so-called Cognitive Revolution in psychology in the late l950s as another instance of combining to defeat a common foe (the behaviorists) in Fuller, End of Knowledge, chapter 5.

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eloquent champion, Michael Polanyi, had failed.  Despite the persuasive case he made for the existence of a “scientific community” (a term of his coinage) and the admiring audiences he secured for penetrating the “tacit dimension” of scientific practice, Polanyi typecast himself as upholding the culture of science in the face of barbarous bureaucrats and creeping socialists. [65]  Participation in the quotidian battles that science fought in the public arena did not permit Polanyi the sort of detached “scientific” rhetoric that characterizes most of the writing in Structure, a point in no small measure responsible for the book’s longevity.

65. See, in particular, Michael Polanyi, “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory,” Minerva 1(1962), 54-73; “The Growth of Science in Society,” Minerva 5 (1967), 533-545.  The work that most influenced Kuhn, especially in stressing the craft character of science over its argumentative side, was Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago, 1957).

66. Kuhn, Structure, 167.

67. A leading SSK practitioner, Harry Collins, sides with Polanyi over Lakatos, in a way which reveals the conservative implications that can be drawn from the day-to-day openness of scientific inquiry: “Even among the experts themselves, who have been trained to many levels above what can be expected of the public’s understanding, radically different opinions are to be found… It is dangerously misleading to pretend that the citizen can judge between the competing views of technical experts when even the experts cannot agree” (Collins, “Certainty and the Public Understanding of Science: Science on Television,” Social Studies of Science 17 [1987], 691).  Ironically, then, while sociologists can step into the breach when philosophers cannot decide among themselves which methodology best explains a certain historical episode of scientific theory choice, the sociologists’ lack of scientific expertise prevents them from intervening in contemporary disputes among scientists trying to resolve their own theory choices!  The underdetermination of theory choice by the evidence thus licenses, for the SSK practitioner, not the introduction of specifically sociological variables, but rather the discretionary judgments of the local experts.

could not be left to their own devices because of their tendency to extend some philosophical caricature of scientific practice - a “methodology” - to aspects of everyday life where it played no constructive role and, indeed, where it could be quite destructive if used to challenge established scientific judgment. [68]

68. During the 1950s and 1960s, Polanyi was not alone in thinking that the authority of the natural sciences was threatened by the social sciences.  Indeed, Vannevar Bush wanted the U.S. government to fund a “National Science Foundation” that specifically excluded the social sciences, not out of a philosophical sense that the social sciences were “unscientific,” but as a result of private foundations becoming reluctant to fund natural science research after its involvement in the atomic bomb project.  Moreover, Bush had to fight off the impression created in the minds of several senators, notably Harley Kilgore, that the social sciences were needed as watchdogs to ensure that natural scientists served the public interest.  See Nathan Reingold, Science American Style (New Brunswick, N.J., 1991), 284-333.  Aside from the atomic bomb, the public image of the natural sciences was tarnished by the attempts of leaders of the scientific community to suppress without testing Immanuel Velikovsky’s best-selling Worlds in Collision, which challenged the received wisdom of physics and chemistry by psychoanalyzing the creation myths of several cultures.  When it turned out that some of Velikovsky’s astronomical predictions were correct, several social scientists took the opportunity to chastise natural scientists for failing to live up to their own avowed standards.  This episode simply led Polanyi to retrench his own position about the necessarily inexplicit character of true scientific expertise.  See Polanyi, “The Growth of Science.”

69. There are a plurality of pluralisms, divided mainly according to the degree of conflict between the interest groups, or voluntary associations, in the society.  A good survey is David Held, Models of Democracy(Stanford, 1987), 186-220.  The model emphasized here is relatively peaceful, drawing on a coordinated division of labor, based on knowledge being distributed across the members of the society.  This is the sort of polity that SSK seems to countenance.  A genealogy of the position can be traced from Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, “The Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey,” Science in Context 4 (1991), 3-21, through Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N.Y., 1967), to Alfred Schutz, [1932] “The Well-Informed Citizen: An Essay in the Social Distribution of Knowledge,” in Collected Papers (The Hague, 1964), II, 120-134.  Schutz, in turn, wanted to provide a phenomenological basis for Austrian economics as part of the microfoundations for unifying the social sciences.  The pluralist polity would thus be a minimal state.  See Christopher Prendergast, “Alfred Schutz and the Austrian School of Economics,” American Journal of Sociology 92 (1986), 1-26.

advise, pluralists advocate tolerating authority that stays within its bounds.  This is a subtle, but significant, shift in the sense of “openness” required of the open society in a world of, so to speak, Big Democracy.  In the case of science, it marks a shift away from criticizing products to understanding practices.  Kuhn participated in educating Americans to this new sense of “democratic control” of science during Structure’s fifteen-year incubation period (1947-1962), during much of which he taught in the General Education in Science curriculum designed by Harvard President James Bryant Conant, who wrote the foreword to Kuhn’s first book and to whom Structure is dedicated. [70]

Whether we like it or not, we are all immersed in an age in which the products of scientific inquiries confront us at every turn.  We may hate them, shudder at the thought of them, embrace them when they bring relief from pain or snatch from death a person whom we love, but the one thing no one can do is banish them.  Therefore every American citizen in the second half of this century would be well advised to try to understand both science and the scientists as best he can. [72]

Conant’s key presumption that survives in Kuhn and, as we shall see shortly, in SSK is that the bridge between science and society is best constructed by the public growing more accustomed to science - rather than by scientists growing more accustomed to the public. [73]

70. Conant describes when he adopted the pluralist conception of democracy in his autobiography, James Conant, My Several Lives (New York, 1970), 366.  Conant wrote the foreword to Thomas Kuhn, Copernican Revolution (New York, 1957), in which he explained Kuhn’s book as an outgrowth of the Harvard General Education curriculum.

71. James Conant, “Foreword,” in General Education in Science, ed. I. B. Cohen and F. G. Watson (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), xiii.

72. James Conant, Science and Common Sense (New Haven, 1961), 3.

73. I do not mean to deny that Conant was concerned that scientists be properly “socialized.”  However, he responded by offering courses that exposed scientists to the old liberal arts culture which dominated the elite colleges prior to World War II.  See Richard Freeland, Academia’s Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945-1970 (Oxford, 1992), 79.

It would be unfair to imply that all of the outreach work inspired by SSK has tended to reinforce an uncritically positive image of science.  For example, a series of booklets published by Deakin University Press are designed to enable Australian citizens to interrogate the role of science and technology in their lives, often by drawing on the critical questions asked by philosophers and sociologists of science in their inquiries.  Especially noteworthy is W. Randall Albury, The Politics of Objectivity (Victoria, 1983).

The goal of our course [is] the development of a healthy and informed attitude toward, an appreciation and understanding of, science… In discussing the earlier and the more recent activities of science it is carefully pointed out to our students that the urgency of the desire for the solution of a particular scientific problem constitutes no guarantee that it will be or even can be solved…That great strides will be made in science cannot be doubted, but that they will lead immediately to a desired end… can be legitimately questioned.  This unbounded optimism can be tempered by the suggestion that unlimited scientific progress in a specified direction cannot be bought or otherwise induced.  Favorable conditions for an advance can be created, and the advance may be accelerated; but the advance itself cannot be created. [74]

It should come as no surprise that when Nash goes on to diagnose “two delusions” that cause students to ask of science more than it can reasonably give, he arrives at suspiciously philosophical disorders: “the cult of the fact” and “the cult of the method.”  The remedy that Nash proposed as “the case approach” involves presenting students with carefully edited versions of classic experimentalist writings that will enable them at least to follow, and perhaps even to re-enact, the experiment in question. [75]  Using a line of argument that Kuhn would later adopt in explaining his Gestalt-based notion of paradigm, Nash defended the suitability of the case approach on the grounds that to understand science is to understand how patterns can be extracted from ambiguous data, a cognitive process that has basically remained unchanged since the rise of experimentation. [76]  Thus, Nash had no qualms about selecting experiments only from before the mid-nineteenth century.  Indeed, such experiments had the additional advantage that their accompanying texts presupposed relatively little esoteric background knowledge.  Even so, the amount of pedagogical guidance involved in this process - “preparation of the materials,” in Nash’s own clinical terms - must have been considerable, as Nash anticipates and meets charges of “spoon-feeding” the students. [77]

74. Leonard Nash, “The Use of Historical Cases in Science Teaching,” in Cohen and Watson, ed., 116-117.

75. Although nowadays an appeal to “cases” in studying science suggests an approach that draws, at least by analogy, on ethnographic field work, in fact this is quite different in spirit from the Harvard approach, which was modeled on effective teaching techniques developed in the law and business schools, whereby stylized episodes would be presented to students as the basis for deriving relevant, generalizable principles.  For an illuminating discussion of the political context from which this practice emerged, see William Buxton and Stephen Turner, “Edification and Expertise: Sociology as a Profession,” in Sociology and Its Publics, ed. T. Halliday and M. Janowitz (Chicago, 1992).  I draw some implications for normative philosophy of science from this lineage in Fuller, End of Knowledge, chapter 6.

76. Nash, 116; Kuhn, Essential Tension, 293-319.

77. Nash, 115.