Thomas Kuhn’s Structure: An “Exemplary Document of the Cold War Era”?

Abstract

The chapter starts with a critical assessment of the arguments made with regard to the Cold War context of the work of Thomas Kuhn, as articulated by Steve Fuller and George Reisch. Against the background of these arguments, the chapter points to the multiplicity of intellectual resources that Kuhn was building upon, highlighting the influence of sociologists of science such as Ludwik Fleck, Robert Merton, and Bernhard Barber. Around 1960, Kuhn had plans to develop sociology of science as a respectable and powerful academic discipline, with the collaboration of some leading representatives of that field. Surprisingly in Structure the sociology of science played only a minor role and was criticized by some authors because of this defect. And in the end Kuhn had to struggle more and more with the attacks of Popper and his followers and the “strong programme” with its reduction of philosophy of science to a sociological sub-discipline. The chapter is based on recent literature and on the archival research in the papers of Kuhn at MIT and Merton at Columbia.

Appendices

Appendix: Michael Polanyi—Another Source for Kuhn’s Conservatism

Not everything that went into Kuhn’s conservative ideas stemmed from the sociology of science however. In the late 1950s, another influence was represented by Michael Polanyi’s works, especially Personal Knowledge, which was published in 1957. ⁶⁴ When Kuhn’s delivered his talk “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research” (and that, by the way, was just a week before the Cold War reached a new height with the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961), his remarks instigated an interesting exchange with the Hungarian-born British intellectual. ⁶⁵

Kuhn had received an invitation from the organizer of the Oxford symposium to talk on measurement in the social sciences. But he had another idea in mind—namely to present the content of first chapters of his Structure, which at that time was not yet finished. Now, the first portion of Structure is all about the notion of the paradigm and normal science, the dogmatic side of scientific development. Any talk about extraordinary science and scientific revolution is still missing in the dogma paper.

How much Kuhn’s and Polanyi’s ideas converged at that time can be seen from the discussion after the talk. Polanyi, the second commentator (after Rupert Hall) said:

The paper by Mr. Thomas Kuhn may arouse opposition from various quarters, but not from me. At the end of it he says that the dependence of research upon a deep commitment to established beliefs receives the very minimum of attention. I could not agree more, I have tried in vain to call attention to this commitment for many years. I hope that if I join forces with Mr. Kuhn we may both do better. ⁶⁶

In his closing remarks Kuhn too emphasized the similarities of his views with those of Polanyi. But he also named a few differences, the most important one being his stress on the scientific community versus Polanyi’s more individualistic outlook:

It is not, after all, the individual who decides whether his discoveries or theoretical inventions shall become part of the body of established science. Rather it is his professional community, a community which has and sometimes exercises the privilege of declaring him a deviant […]. I take the “social implication” of my views more seriously than his [Polany’s] commentary suggests. ⁶⁷

Notwithstanding minor differences between Kuhn and Polanyi at the Oxford conference, it is perhaps no wonder that the only one of Popper’s disciples attending the conference, Imre Lakatos, had the impression that Kuhn was “just a footnote” to Polanyi. But soon afterward things changed dramatically. After the publication of Structure one year later, Polanyi himself was relegated to a footnote. And Kuhn, during his next travel to England when he attended the 1965 London conference had his hands full convincing the audience, and especially Popper and his followers, that he did not preach a personalist, elitist philosophy of science. Later on, he took distance from his article “Function of Dogma” and rejected proposals to have it republished. ⁶⁸

Toward the end of his life in a long biographical interview, Kuhn did everything he could to downplay Polanyi’s influence on his ideas. On the other hand, Polanyi’s scholars went on to suggest that Kuhn’s theory drew on Polanyi. In view of Kuhn’s lengthy occupation with the sociology of science (which was independent of his reading of Polanyi) and its conservative trends, these accusations miss their target as much as those about his connections with the Cold War.

Notes

• 1. This prominent SDS member, Volkhard Scholten, died some years ago, and I dedicate this article to his memory.

• 2. Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke, Doctors of Infamy: The Story of the Nazi Medical Crimes (New York: Schuman, 1949); Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat. Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager (Franfurt/Main: Verlag der Frankfurter Hefte, 1946).

• 3. James Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993).

• 4. Steve Fuller, Kuhn Vs. Popper. The Struggle for the Soul of Science (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003), 193.

• 5. Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn. A Philosophical History for Our Times (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 5.

• 6. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Road Since Structure. Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, edited by James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 275.

• 7. Ibidem, 276.

• 8. T. S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution. Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought, foreword by James B. Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).

• 9. Steve Fuller, Kuhn Vs. Popper. The Struggle for the Soul of Science, 213.

• 10. Ibidem, 193–215.

• 11. Ibidem, 215.

• 12. See Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges (Frankfurt am Main: 2000), 81–274 for a collection of his speeches, letters, etc. during his time as Rektor of Freiburg University and also some of his writings as professor in the Third Reich (especially the footnotes at p. 308 and pp. 345–347). On Heidegger and Nazism see for instance: Víctor Farías, Joseph Margolis, and Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

• 13. Steve Fuller, Kuhn Vs. Popper. The Struggle for the Soul of Science, 207.

• 14. Ibidem, 206.

• 15. What was later famously published as Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

• 16. Lakatos to Kuhn, 26 March 1970, in “Correspondence” (13), “Kuhn, Thomas” (512), Imre Lakatos Papers, LSE Library Archive.

• 17. Imre Lakatos, “A letter to the Director of the London School of Economics,” 1968 in I. Lakatos, Mathematics, Science and Epistemology, edited by John Worrall and Gregory Currie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 247–253.

• 18. Lakatos’ answer to Kuhn’s letter cited above reads: “To my knowledge, the association of military research with the universities is here (i.e: in GB) regarded as completely out of order and, in fact, when the Defence Ministry offered to finance a position at the LSE in which a man would have had some connection with the Ministry, the proposal was rejected outright”. Lakatos to Kuhn, undated, in “Correspondence” (13), “Kuhn, Thomas” (512), Imre Lakatos Papers, LSE Library Archive.

• 19. Sarah Bridger, Scientists at War: The Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2015), 221.

• 20. Sara Bridger, “Scientists and the Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research,” PhD Dissertation: Columbia University, 2011, 340.

• 21. Ibidem, 346.

• 22. Ibidem, 343 and 347.

• 23. Ibidem, 350. On the origins of Forman’s theses see also Turchetti in this volume. Bridger does not discuss in detail the relationship between Forman and Kuhn, but concludes her dissertation with an outlook into Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program. Today, it would be relevant to look into the enormous defense buildup after 9/11 and also into the “applied” research associated with worldwide surveillance activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies.

• 24. Hac Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper. The Formative Years 1902–1945(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). On the origins of Popper’s political philosophy in the 1920s see also: Hans-Joachim Dahms, “Karl Poppers erste Schritte in die Philosophie: Leonard Nelsons Paradoxien der Souveränität und Nelsons sowie Poppers Lösungsversuche,” in Karl Popper: A Centenary Assessment, Volume I: Life and Times, and Values in a World of Facts, edited by Ian Jarvie, Karl Milford, and David Miller (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 83–89.

• 25. Karl Popper, Open Society and its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).

• 26. See Popper’s 1992 Foreword to the 7th edition of Open Society and its Enemies. Popper’s “practical-political receipts of reformism” and his idea of an open society were included as “anti-communistic conceptions” into the obligatory curriculum for philosophy students in the GDR. See on this H. J. Dahms, “Philosophie an der Universität Jena 1946–1989,” in: Hochschule im Sozialismus. Studien zur Geschichte der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (1945–1990), edited by Uwe Hoßfeld, Tobias Kaiser, and Heinz Mestrup (Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2007), 1568–1626, on 1604.

• 27. George Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

• 28. Kuhn to Conant, 29 June 1961, quoted in G. Reisch, “When Structure met Sputnik: On the Cold War origins of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” in: Science and Technology in the Global Cold War, edited by Naomi Oreskes and John Krige (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), 371–392, on 373.

• 29. Kuhn, The Road Since Structure, 308.

• 30. T. S. Kuhn, “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research,” in: Scientific Change. Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Technical Invention, from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Alistair C. Crombie (London: Heinemann, 1963), 347–369, on 348. From my pupils days in Wuppertal I remember Karl Fuhlrott, a gymnasium teacher who found the first skeleton of the Neanderthal man in a valley between Wuppertal and Düsseldorf in Western Germany, but was treated by leading anatomists of his time like Rudolf Virchow with contempt. The bones found by Fuhlrott were described by these “authorities” as those of a disfigured human being.

• 31. Kuhn, “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research,” 364.

• 32. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 92 ff.

• 33. Kuhn, The Road Since Structure, 295.

• 34. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, VI f.

• 35. Benno Schwabe & Co publishers to L. Fleck, 8 December 1959 cit. in Ludwik Fleck, Denkstile und Tatsachen. Gesammelte Schriften und Zeugnisse, edited by Sylwia Werner and Claus Zittel (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011), 594.

• 36. T. Kuhn, “Foreword,” in L. Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, edited by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979), vii–xi. On the lack of coverage on Fleck’s work see also Kokowski’s article in this volume.

• 37. One major difference between Fleck’s and Kuhn’s works is that the discipline from which Fleck takes his examples and especially his main example (syphilis) comes from medicine rather than physics.

• 38. Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, 38.

• 39. Ibidem, 39.

• 40. Kuhn, The Road Since Structure, 283.

• 41. Kuhn, “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research,” 352.

• 42. Fleck, The Genesis of a Scientific Fact, 27.

• 43. Ibidem.

• 44. Kuhn, The Road Since Structure.

• 45. Sylwia Werner and Claus Zittel, “Einleitung: Denkstile und Tatsachen,” in: Ludwik Fleck, Denkstile und Tatsachen. Gesammelte Schriften und Zeugnisse, 9–51, on 30 f.

• 46. See the correspondence between Fleck and Schlick, in Fleck, Denkstile und Tatsachen. Gesammelte Schriften und Zeugnisse, 561–565. That Schlick recommended Fleck’s book to his publisher for incorporation into the book series shows that Kuhn’s allegation that Fleck’s “Polish-German … (had) been so very difficult” is not entirely correct (see Kuhn, The Road to Structure, 283). As a German I have to say that I find Fleck’s language very idiomatic and elegant.

• 47. Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction. An Analysis of the Foundations and the Structure of Knowledge, with a new introduction by Alan W. Richardson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006 [1938]). Kuhn, The Road to Structure.

• 48. Fleck’s correspondence with his publisher Benno Schwabe Verlag in: Fleck, Denkstile und Tatsachen. Gesammelte Schriften und Zeugnisse, 592–596.

• 49. Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau, “Kuhn and cognitive psychology,” in Vienna Circle Yearbook 2017, edited by Friedrich Stadler (Dordrecht: Springer (forthcoming)).

• 50. Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958). On Hanson see the recent biography: Matthew D. Lund, N. R. Hanson. Observation, Discovery and Scientific Change, foreword by Hasok Chang (Amherst, NY: Humanities Books, 2010). On the Gestalt-theory see especially 85 ff. and 151–154.

• 51. Quoted in Reisch, “When Structure met Sputnik: On the Cold War origins of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,”375.

• 52. Ibidem, 375.

• 53. Ibidem, 375.

• 54. Cited in Reisch, unpublished draft, 2014, 7.

• 55. Thomas S. Kuhn, “Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery,” in Critical Problems in the History of Science, edited by Marshall Clagett (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 321–356. Reprinted in T. S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension. Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977), 66–104.

• 56. Bernard Barber, “Resistance by Scientists to Scientific Discovery,” Science 134 (1961), 596–602. A copy of the pre-print sent by Barber is in Kuhn’s papers collection at the MIT.

• 57. T. S. Kuhn, “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research,” in Scientific Change, edited by Alistair C. Crombie, 347–369.

• 58. Ibidem, 364, emphasis added.

• 59. Fred Greenstein and Austin Ranney, “Pendleton Herring (27 October 1903–17 August 2004),” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 150/3 (2006): 487–492, on 491. See also the obituary: Matt Schudel, “Political Intellectual Pendleton Herring, 100,” The Washington Post, 20 August 2004.

• 60. Kuhn To Herring, 21 December 1959, in Thomas S. Kuhn Papers, Box 23, MC 240, MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections.

• 61. On this see also K. Brad Wray, “Kuhn’s Social Epistemology and the Sociology of Science,” in Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions—50 Years On, edited by William J. Devlin and Alisa Bokulich (Boston: Springer, 2015),167–184, on 171.

• 62. This is what the internet guide to the SSRC papers suggests: Kenneth W. Rose, “A Guide to the Social Science Research Council Archives at the Rockefeller Archive Center,” New York, 1999, text above footnote 49 and the list of committee projects. Available at: http://www.rockarch.org/collections/nonrockorgs/ssrcdoc.pdf, accessed 12.05.2015. I further explore some of these connections in Hans Joachim Dahms, “Thomas Kuhn’s Place in the Sociology of Science,” in Vienna Circle Yearbook 2017 [forthcoming].

• 63. “Kuhn must periodically be tempted to exclaim, after the fashion of that Victorian scholar who spent much of his long exile in the British Museum: ‘Je ne suis pas Kuhniste’.” See Robert K. Merton, “Structural Analysis in Sociology,” in Sociological Ambivalence and Other Essays (New York: The Free Press, 1976), 109–144, on 134.

• 64. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). On Kuhn and Polanyi see also Martin X. Moleski, “Polanyi vs. Kuhn: Worldviews Apart,” Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical 33/2 (2006): 8–24.

• 65. See the first footnote in T. S. Kuhn, “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research,” 347.

• 66. Commentary by Michael Polanyi on Kuhn’s “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research,” in Scientific Change, edited by A. C. Crombie, 375–380, on 375.

• 67. Kuhn, Reply in Scientific Change, edited by A. C. Crombie, 394 f.

• 68. See Reisch, “When Structure met Sputnik: On the Cold War origins of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” He agreed to republish instead T. S. Kuhn, “The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research,” in The Third University of Utah Research Conference on the Identification of Scientific Talent, edited by C. W. Taylor (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1959), 162–174.