Dr. Kuhn or How I Learned to Stop Worryi
V A S SI L I KI B E T T Y S M OC OV I T I S *
Dr. Kuhn, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Started
Loving The Structure
Winston Churchill once remarked that the only successful revolutions are those
made by conservatives. L. Pearce Williams and Henry John Steffens1
Like many historians of science, my first encounter with Thomas Kuhn’s provocative text, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, came in an introductory
graduate seminar in the historiography of science. The course was taught by
L. Pearce Williams, no great fan of Kuhn’s, or of some of the new approaches
to the history of science in the s. Pearce was scary, at first. A famously
disagreeable Cornell professor with strong conservative leanings (Ann Coulter
was one of his more famous mentees), Pearce lectured in a stentorian voice,
even if only four or five of us were present. Huddling around a small table and
poring over our texts, we were exceptionally wary of what we said or how we
said it, lest we trigger an outburst of verbal volley fire.
Virtually anything said about Kuhn and his work could engender that kind
of reaction from Pearce, who viewed Kuhn’s book as a kind of virus that had
infected the minds of vulnerable academics since . The book might appeal
to people outside the field who knew little or nothing about it, he said, but serious historians of science objected to the quality of the argument, the evidentiary base, and the crudeness with which Kuhn tried to understand the history
of science. Besides all that, he pointed out that Kuhn was not entirely original,
*Departments of Biology and History, University of Florida, Bartram Hall, Gainesville, FL
; bsmocovi@ufl.edu.
Acknowledgments I wish to thank Andrew Wilson for sharing his reminiscences of the
Cornell graduate experience with me in preparation of this paper. I also wish to acknowledge the
generous support and teachings of L. Pearce Williams and my other mentors at Cornell.
. L. Pearce Williams and Henry John Steffens, The History of Science in Western Civilization,
Vol. , The Scientific Revolution (Washington, DC: University Press of America, ), .
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 42, Number 5, pps. 564–569. ISSN 1939-1811,
electronic ISSN 1939-182X. © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights
reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content
through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2012.42.5.564.
564 |
F I F T Y Y E A R S O F S T R U C T U R E — H S N S E S S AY S | 5 6 5
having drawn on Ludwik Fleck’s insightful reflections in Genesis and the Development of a Scientific Fact ().2 So, as good graduate students, we scrutinized each text trying to find parallels between Kuhn and Fleck. (Examining
my annotated copies, about the only thing I can make out with certainty is
that the words “vague” and “fuzzy” appear as marginalia with equal regularity
in both.)
Pearce was a delightful performer, the child of a “show-biz” family accustomed to theatricality and fond of hyperbolic excess (either that, or he was
obsessed with German Romanticism, what with all that Sturm und Drang).
Pearce was also a great historian, with a deep knowledge of the field, who
taught generations of students a love of history for its own sake, and what I
still refer to as a view of history with a capital “H.” We began that seminar
engaging R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of Nature and Idea of History, as Pearce
extolled the virtues of interpretive history, the importance of narrative crafting,
and stressed that history was a humanistic and literary exercise, replete with
tropes of irony, tragedy, comedy, and the like. Using Collingwood, he conveyed
to us the enormity of the empathetic demands placed on historians whose goal
was to gain understanding or to give expression to something called “the
human condition.” Collingwood was Pearce’s way of setting the stage for what
was come, namely the triumvirate of Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos (whom he
always evoked always in that order). Pearce had a deep respect for philosophy,
but he didn’t care for philosophical fashion. He was a great admirer of Norwood Russell Hanson, whose assertion, a wordplay on Kant, that “history of
science without philosophy is blind; philosophy of science without history is
empty,” provided the intellectual foundation of the new program Pearce was
building at Cornell.
This was why Kuhn had to be taken—and engaged—seriously. Whatever
disciplinary label you wanted to put on Kuhn, his project delved profoundly
into the history of thought. The view that scientific knowledge was grounded
in history, opening the door to a historicist thinking, was an argument no serious historian of Pearce’s generation could easily dismiss. As a physicist, furthermore, Kuhn’s technical understanding could not be easily challenged, and
physics was the disciplinary centerpiece of the history of science at that time.
That mattered at a place like Cornell, where competence in the technical subject area, especially physics, was considered de rigueur.
. Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and the Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. Fred Bradley and
Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, []).
566 | SMOCOVITIS
Whatever its strengths, the book nonetheless became a flash point, if not the
flash point, for critical discussion by scholars in both history and philosophy
of science after . And however extreme he may have appeared in his criticism, Pearce Williams was hardly alone: a dizzying number of critiques had
accumulated by that time, the most memorable of which was the hatchet job
on Kuhn’s use of the “p” word (banished from my lexicon forevermore) by
Margaret Masterman, whose linguistic unpacking showed a less than consistent
use of the term.3 That was child’s play compared to Paul Feyerabend’s notorious
attack on Kuhn, expressing his frustration at all the shoddy scholarship Structure had engendered. We read Feyerabend with a mixture of horror and delight
more common to readers of tabloid journalism than scholarship, and left the
room laughing but wary of the many “creeps and incompetents” in the field.4
There were other more forgettable challenges, and few of Kuhn’s responses were
effective at assuaging the critics, especially on points of vagueness or language;
Kuhn’s usual response was to claim his readers just didn’t understand.5 This was
so much the case that a part of me still thinks of Kuhn as the person who became very famous largely by being misunderstood.
I had additional concerns of my own. As someone more interested in biology
than physics, I wondered to what extent Kuhn’s project applied to the history
of the biological sciences. It didn’t seem to fit into what I knew of the history
of molecular biology or genetics, and it certainly didn’t help with the other
great “revolution” in science, the so-called Darwinian Revolution, which was
finally getting serious attention. A number of intellectual historians like John
Greene were asking similar questions, as were philosophers of biology like
Michael Ruse, all pointing to serious problems with Kuhn’s thesis.6 I made the
. Margaret Masterman, “The Nature of a Paradigm,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.
. Feyerabend’s essay first appeared in in Radical Philosophy, pp. –, and has been reprinted extensively. See Paul Feyerabend, “How to Defend Science Against Society,” in Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science, ed. E. D. Klemke, R. Hollinger, and A. D. Kline
(Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, ), –, on . See also the electronic version available in
The Galilean Library: http://www.galileanlibrary.org/manuscript.php?postid= (last accessed
on May ).
. See, for example, Thomas Kuhn, “Reflections on My Critics,” in Criticism and the Growth
of Knowledge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ),
–.
. See John Greene, “The Kuhnian Paradigm and the Darwinian Revolution in Natural History,” in Perspectives in the History of Science and Technology, ed. D. Roller (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, ), –. See also the follow-up commentary essays by William Coleman
(pp. –) and Leonard Wilson (pp. –). For reflections on Kuhn and the role it played in
F I F T Y Y E A R S O F S T R U C T U R E — H S N S E S S AY S | 5 6 7
terrible mistake of mentioning this in a class on “Darwin and NineteenthCentury Philosophy,” with Marjorie Grene, a formidable presence in the philosophy of biology. Her reaction at the mere mention of Kuhn scared the
daylights out of me: she foamed at the mouth and shouted at me for even
bringing it up.7 Something must clearly be wrong with the book, I surmised.
I put it on the mental back burner in a category of its own labeled “important
for some reason, but I am not going there any more,” and moved on with a
thesis on the historical event called the “evolutionary synthesis.” Neither William B. Provine nor Ernst Mayr thought it relevant to the history of evolutionary biology or to the synthesis, as they were articulating it at the time.8
Curiosity got the better of me, especially after I snuck into the series of
lectures by Dominick LaCapra, from whom we had been sheltered as students.
He was then in the throes of introducing literary criticism into intellectual
history but was unsettling to traditionalists who preferred the history of ideas.9
He could not be easily ignored, however: cool and detached in personality, his
lectures were delivered with razor-sharp precision in a funky New York City
accent. Somewhere in between references to apocalyptic paradigms and themes
of the carnivalesque, LaCapra contrasted Kuhn’s characterization of science as
puzzle-solving activity with a problematic—the latter having the possibility of
no real solution. It was the first time I’d heard anyone utter the name without
criticism. My curiosity was additionally piqued by the arrival of Peter Dear,
whose historiography syllabus drew on a new literature in the sociology of science that built on Kuhn, and I knew that Martin Rudwick’s The Great
the publication of The Darwinian Revolution: Nature Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, ), see Michael Ruse, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Chronicle
of Higher Education, Jul , online edition at http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/thestructure-of-scientific-revolutions/ (last accessed on Jul ).
. For background on Marjorie Grene and that class see Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, “Marjorie,
Matriarchy, and ‘Wretched Reflection’: A Personal Remembrance of Marjorie Grene,” Biological
Theory (): –.
. Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine, eds., The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the
Unification of Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). See also Ernst Mayr,
“The Nature of the Darwinian Revolution,” Science (): –.
. See Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Text, Contexts, Language (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, ); Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, ); and his earlier co-edited collection of papers, Dominick LaCapra and
Steven L. Kaplan, Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, ).
568 | SMOCOVITIS
Devonian Controversy was also getting a huge amount of attention at the time.10
I read it in only a couple of sittings and realized how clever he had been to
focus on a community and to devise such wonderfully novel techniques for
historical analysis.
But the real shocker came after a summer immersion course in literary and
composition theory as part of the writing-across-the-disciplines program I was
teaching in that year. After dismissing most of the readings as incomprehensible
gobbledy-gook, I underwent a kind of “conversion experience,” or so my instructors said. A “gestalt-switch” had been tripped. Nothing looked the same
after my last summer at Cornell: I saw science in terms of communities, reception theories, problematics, rhetoric, and discursive formations, instead of the
history of disembodied ideas that followed an internal logic. It was confusing
as heck, but illuminating too, especially when I turned those perspectives onto
the evolutionary synthesis—lo and behold, there too was a community, a discursive formation, negotiating a shared language, as they formed a new discipline called “evolutionary biology” and employed a kind of “disciplinary
discourse.” I also began to appreciate Kuhn’s insightful notion of the disciplinary matrix and amended it to the disciplinary problematic.11
My mentors at Cornell thus may have had a legitimate set of concerns with
Kuhn’s project, but they were too quick to dismiss it, or to appreciate how and
where its impact would eventually be felt. Most shared commitments to an
older view of the history of ideas that viewed science in terms of the establishment of grand, overarching explanatory theories, and to a history of science in
terms of conventional internal vs. external determinants. One might even say
that they themselves upheld a vision of the history of philosophy of science
with more than faint traces of positivism: Marjorie Grene, for example, had
been associated directly with Rudolf Carnap at the University of Chicago.
Kuhn began a project of demonstrating how those ideas could be embedded
in a community of thought, and in the process opened a conversation with the
sociology of science, and more specifically with the sociology and anthropology
. Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, ).
. This insight, combined with later readings first in the sociology of science and then in
what was known as the new intellectual and cultural history (see Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer,
Donna Haraway, J. G. A. Pocock, Michel de Certeau, and Lynn Hunt, for example), eventually
led to Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, “Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary
Biology,” Journal for the History of Biology (): –; Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Unifying
Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, ).
F I F T Y Y E A R S O F S T R U C T U R E — H S N S E S S AY S | 5 6 9
of knowledge. It wasn’t his intention at the outset, of course, but that is what
eventually came out of the publication of his book, as it made its way to varied
audiences and younger historians of science.
Let us remember that Kuhn was curious about what a serious engagement
with history would do for understanding the “growth” of physics, using an
approach common to the history and philosophy of science. But he knew little
about the philosophy of history, and drew from Gestalt psychologists who were
popular at the time. As a result he saw a structuralist trajectory of science that
included ruptures or breaks between incommensurable worlds; and he used a
language to describe what he saw that was less than meaningful—or perhaps
too much so, if we follow Masterman. His monograph was imperfect, and it
was crude, and it may have not been entirely original, but its publication
nonetheless became the starting point for a long conversation that contributed
to the view held by many historians of science today, that science is a historically rooted and culturally embedded set of practices. That is why I have never
seen Kuhn or his Structure as “revolutionary” in the conventional sense of the
term, though it did eventually enable a kind of revolution in the way many
historians now think about science and its history.12 It was possibly a “revolution-making text,” in much the same way he had articulated elsewhere.13 Ultimately, however, it led to a recovery of some of that older view of history as
a profoundly interpretive activity that makes empathetic demands of its practitioners; and in its emphasis on language and discourse, returns us to a view
of history that recovers some of that originary historiography with a capital
“H.” Insofar as it succeeded in returning us to that, it was a revolution to be
sure, but a peculiarly conservative one at that.
. For a discussion of the varied meanings of the term “revolution” see Raymond Williams,
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
. See Kuhn’s famous interpretation of the Copernican achievement in Thomas Kuhn, The
Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ).
Dr. Kuhn, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Started
Loving The Structure
Winston Churchill once remarked that the only successful revolutions are those
made by conservatives. L. Pearce Williams and Henry John Steffens1
Like many historians of science, my first encounter with Thomas Kuhn’s provocative text, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, came in an introductory
graduate seminar in the historiography of science. The course was taught by
L. Pearce Williams, no great fan of Kuhn’s, or of some of the new approaches
to the history of science in the s. Pearce was scary, at first. A famously
disagreeable Cornell professor with strong conservative leanings (Ann Coulter
was one of his more famous mentees), Pearce lectured in a stentorian voice,
even if only four or five of us were present. Huddling around a small table and
poring over our texts, we were exceptionally wary of what we said or how we
said it, lest we trigger an outburst of verbal volley fire.
Virtually anything said about Kuhn and his work could engender that kind
of reaction from Pearce, who viewed Kuhn’s book as a kind of virus that had
infected the minds of vulnerable academics since . The book might appeal
to people outside the field who knew little or nothing about it, he said, but serious historians of science objected to the quality of the argument, the evidentiary base, and the crudeness with which Kuhn tried to understand the history
of science. Besides all that, he pointed out that Kuhn was not entirely original,
*Departments of Biology and History, University of Florida, Bartram Hall, Gainesville, FL
; bsmocovi@ufl.edu.
Acknowledgments I wish to thank Andrew Wilson for sharing his reminiscences of the
Cornell graduate experience with me in preparation of this paper. I also wish to acknowledge the
generous support and teachings of L. Pearce Williams and my other mentors at Cornell.
. L. Pearce Williams and Henry John Steffens, The History of Science in Western Civilization,
Vol. , The Scientific Revolution (Washington, DC: University Press of America, ), .
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 42, Number 5, pps. 564–569. ISSN 1939-1811,
electronic ISSN 1939-182X. © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights
reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content
through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2012.42.5.564.
564 |
F I F T Y Y E A R S O F S T R U C T U R E — H S N S E S S AY S | 5 6 5
having drawn on Ludwik Fleck’s insightful reflections in Genesis and the Development of a Scientific Fact ().2 So, as good graduate students, we scrutinized each text trying to find parallels between Kuhn and Fleck. (Examining
my annotated copies, about the only thing I can make out with certainty is
that the words “vague” and “fuzzy” appear as marginalia with equal regularity
in both.)
Pearce was a delightful performer, the child of a “show-biz” family accustomed to theatricality and fond of hyperbolic excess (either that, or he was
obsessed with German Romanticism, what with all that Sturm und Drang).
Pearce was also a great historian, with a deep knowledge of the field, who
taught generations of students a love of history for its own sake, and what I
still refer to as a view of history with a capital “H.” We began that seminar
engaging R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of Nature and Idea of History, as Pearce
extolled the virtues of interpretive history, the importance of narrative crafting,
and stressed that history was a humanistic and literary exercise, replete with
tropes of irony, tragedy, comedy, and the like. Using Collingwood, he conveyed
to us the enormity of the empathetic demands placed on historians whose goal
was to gain understanding or to give expression to something called “the
human condition.” Collingwood was Pearce’s way of setting the stage for what
was come, namely the triumvirate of Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos (whom he
always evoked always in that order). Pearce had a deep respect for philosophy,
but he didn’t care for philosophical fashion. He was a great admirer of Norwood Russell Hanson, whose assertion, a wordplay on Kant, that “history of
science without philosophy is blind; philosophy of science without history is
empty,” provided the intellectual foundation of the new program Pearce was
building at Cornell.
This was why Kuhn had to be taken—and engaged—seriously. Whatever
disciplinary label you wanted to put on Kuhn, his project delved profoundly
into the history of thought. The view that scientific knowledge was grounded
in history, opening the door to a historicist thinking, was an argument no serious historian of Pearce’s generation could easily dismiss. As a physicist, furthermore, Kuhn’s technical understanding could not be easily challenged, and
physics was the disciplinary centerpiece of the history of science at that time.
That mattered at a place like Cornell, where competence in the technical subject area, especially physics, was considered de rigueur.
. Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and the Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. Fred Bradley and
Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, []).
566 | SMOCOVITIS
Whatever its strengths, the book nonetheless became a flash point, if not the
flash point, for critical discussion by scholars in both history and philosophy
of science after . And however extreme he may have appeared in his criticism, Pearce Williams was hardly alone: a dizzying number of critiques had
accumulated by that time, the most memorable of which was the hatchet job
on Kuhn’s use of the “p” word (banished from my lexicon forevermore) by
Margaret Masterman, whose linguistic unpacking showed a less than consistent
use of the term.3 That was child’s play compared to Paul Feyerabend’s notorious
attack on Kuhn, expressing his frustration at all the shoddy scholarship Structure had engendered. We read Feyerabend with a mixture of horror and delight
more common to readers of tabloid journalism than scholarship, and left the
room laughing but wary of the many “creeps and incompetents” in the field.4
There were other more forgettable challenges, and few of Kuhn’s responses were
effective at assuaging the critics, especially on points of vagueness or language;
Kuhn’s usual response was to claim his readers just didn’t understand.5 This was
so much the case that a part of me still thinks of Kuhn as the person who became very famous largely by being misunderstood.
I had additional concerns of my own. As someone more interested in biology
than physics, I wondered to what extent Kuhn’s project applied to the history
of the biological sciences. It didn’t seem to fit into what I knew of the history
of molecular biology or genetics, and it certainly didn’t help with the other
great “revolution” in science, the so-called Darwinian Revolution, which was
finally getting serious attention. A number of intellectual historians like John
Greene were asking similar questions, as were philosophers of biology like
Michael Ruse, all pointing to serious problems with Kuhn’s thesis.6 I made the
. Margaret Masterman, “The Nature of a Paradigm,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.
. Feyerabend’s essay first appeared in in Radical Philosophy, pp. –, and has been reprinted extensively. See Paul Feyerabend, “How to Defend Science Against Society,” in Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science, ed. E. D. Klemke, R. Hollinger, and A. D. Kline
(Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, ), –, on . See also the electronic version available in
The Galilean Library: http://www.galileanlibrary.org/manuscript.php?postid= (last accessed
on May ).
. See, for example, Thomas Kuhn, “Reflections on My Critics,” in Criticism and the Growth
of Knowledge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ),
–.
. See John Greene, “The Kuhnian Paradigm and the Darwinian Revolution in Natural History,” in Perspectives in the History of Science and Technology, ed. D. Roller (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, ), –. See also the follow-up commentary essays by William Coleman
(pp. –) and Leonard Wilson (pp. –). For reflections on Kuhn and the role it played in
F I F T Y Y E A R S O F S T R U C T U R E — H S N S E S S AY S | 5 6 7
terrible mistake of mentioning this in a class on “Darwin and NineteenthCentury Philosophy,” with Marjorie Grene, a formidable presence in the philosophy of biology. Her reaction at the mere mention of Kuhn scared the
daylights out of me: she foamed at the mouth and shouted at me for even
bringing it up.7 Something must clearly be wrong with the book, I surmised.
I put it on the mental back burner in a category of its own labeled “important
for some reason, but I am not going there any more,” and moved on with a
thesis on the historical event called the “evolutionary synthesis.” Neither William B. Provine nor Ernst Mayr thought it relevant to the history of evolutionary biology or to the synthesis, as they were articulating it at the time.8
Curiosity got the better of me, especially after I snuck into the series of
lectures by Dominick LaCapra, from whom we had been sheltered as students.
He was then in the throes of introducing literary criticism into intellectual
history but was unsettling to traditionalists who preferred the history of ideas.9
He could not be easily ignored, however: cool and detached in personality, his
lectures were delivered with razor-sharp precision in a funky New York City
accent. Somewhere in between references to apocalyptic paradigms and themes
of the carnivalesque, LaCapra contrasted Kuhn’s characterization of science as
puzzle-solving activity with a problematic—the latter having the possibility of
no real solution. It was the first time I’d heard anyone utter the name without
criticism. My curiosity was additionally piqued by the arrival of Peter Dear,
whose historiography syllabus drew on a new literature in the sociology of science that built on Kuhn, and I knew that Martin Rudwick’s The Great
the publication of The Darwinian Revolution: Nature Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, ), see Michael Ruse, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Chronicle
of Higher Education, Jul , online edition at http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/thestructure-of-scientific-revolutions/ (last accessed on Jul ).
. For background on Marjorie Grene and that class see Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, “Marjorie,
Matriarchy, and ‘Wretched Reflection’: A Personal Remembrance of Marjorie Grene,” Biological
Theory (): –.
. Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine, eds., The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the
Unification of Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). See also Ernst Mayr,
“The Nature of the Darwinian Revolution,” Science (): –.
. See Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Text, Contexts, Language (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, ); Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, ); and his earlier co-edited collection of papers, Dominick LaCapra and
Steven L. Kaplan, Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, ).
568 | SMOCOVITIS
Devonian Controversy was also getting a huge amount of attention at the time.10
I read it in only a couple of sittings and realized how clever he had been to
focus on a community and to devise such wonderfully novel techniques for
historical analysis.
But the real shocker came after a summer immersion course in literary and
composition theory as part of the writing-across-the-disciplines program I was
teaching in that year. After dismissing most of the readings as incomprehensible
gobbledy-gook, I underwent a kind of “conversion experience,” or so my instructors said. A “gestalt-switch” had been tripped. Nothing looked the same
after my last summer at Cornell: I saw science in terms of communities, reception theories, problematics, rhetoric, and discursive formations, instead of the
history of disembodied ideas that followed an internal logic. It was confusing
as heck, but illuminating too, especially when I turned those perspectives onto
the evolutionary synthesis—lo and behold, there too was a community, a discursive formation, negotiating a shared language, as they formed a new discipline called “evolutionary biology” and employed a kind of “disciplinary
discourse.” I also began to appreciate Kuhn’s insightful notion of the disciplinary matrix and amended it to the disciplinary problematic.11
My mentors at Cornell thus may have had a legitimate set of concerns with
Kuhn’s project, but they were too quick to dismiss it, or to appreciate how and
where its impact would eventually be felt. Most shared commitments to an
older view of the history of ideas that viewed science in terms of the establishment of grand, overarching explanatory theories, and to a history of science in
terms of conventional internal vs. external determinants. One might even say
that they themselves upheld a vision of the history of philosophy of science
with more than faint traces of positivism: Marjorie Grene, for example, had
been associated directly with Rudolf Carnap at the University of Chicago.
Kuhn began a project of demonstrating how those ideas could be embedded
in a community of thought, and in the process opened a conversation with the
sociology of science, and more specifically with the sociology and anthropology
. Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, ).
. This insight, combined with later readings first in the sociology of science and then in
what was known as the new intellectual and cultural history (see Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer,
Donna Haraway, J. G. A. Pocock, Michel de Certeau, and Lynn Hunt, for example), eventually
led to Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, “Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary
Biology,” Journal for the History of Biology (): –; Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Unifying
Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, ).
F I F T Y Y E A R S O F S T R U C T U R E — H S N S E S S AY S | 5 6 9
of knowledge. It wasn’t his intention at the outset, of course, but that is what
eventually came out of the publication of his book, as it made its way to varied
audiences and younger historians of science.
Let us remember that Kuhn was curious about what a serious engagement
with history would do for understanding the “growth” of physics, using an
approach common to the history and philosophy of science. But he knew little
about the philosophy of history, and drew from Gestalt psychologists who were
popular at the time. As a result he saw a structuralist trajectory of science that
included ruptures or breaks between incommensurable worlds; and he used a
language to describe what he saw that was less than meaningful—or perhaps
too much so, if we follow Masterman. His monograph was imperfect, and it
was crude, and it may have not been entirely original, but its publication
nonetheless became the starting point for a long conversation that contributed
to the view held by many historians of science today, that science is a historically rooted and culturally embedded set of practices. That is why I have never
seen Kuhn or his Structure as “revolutionary” in the conventional sense of the
term, though it did eventually enable a kind of revolution in the way many
historians now think about science and its history.12 It was possibly a “revolution-making text,” in much the same way he had articulated elsewhere.13 Ultimately, however, it led to a recovery of some of that older view of history as
a profoundly interpretive activity that makes empathetic demands of its practitioners; and in its emphasis on language and discourse, returns us to a view
of history that recovers some of that originary historiography with a capital
“H.” Insofar as it succeeded in returning us to that, it was a revolution to be
sure, but a peculiarly conservative one at that.
. For a discussion of the varied meanings of the term “revolution” see Raymond Williams,
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
. See Kuhn’s famous interpretation of the Copernican achievement in Thomas Kuhn, The
Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ).