Thomas Kuhn:

A Historian’s Personal Recollections

Shigeru Nakayama*

Nervous Breakdown

Immediately after Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) published the first edition of his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (hereafter abbreviated as Structure) in 1962, philosophers of science attacked him. Karl R. Popper, for example, blamed Kuhn with his famous comment, “down with the normal science.”[1] Kuhn’s pride was so damaged by such ridicule from philosophers (especially on the points of his misuse of philosophical jargon)that he suffered from a sort of nervous breakdown for some years. Its symptom appeared in his oft-spoken expression: “Please do not quote me. Everybody misunderstands me. Unless you have my previous permission, please do not refer to my saying!”

As a former student of Kuhn, I witnessed how he coped with philosophers’ criticisms. In the late 1960s, I advised Kuhn to add a section “postscript 1969”[2] for a Japanese edition[3] (on which I was working) and thereby end the controversy. I even said to him, “You know, philosophers are professional debaters, who found in your thesis an attractive target that provides them the opportunities for endless attack.”

From the outset of his quarrel with science philosophers, it was quite clear to me that the difference of their views (or images) of science might never be resolved. While Kuhn primarily wrote the Structure as a historiography of science for historians of science,[4] philosophers of science, like the Popperians, took it to be an ideology, or as a study on how scientists ought to be. While Kuhn described the way that ordinary scientists tend to proceed in their problem-solving activities, philosophers argue from the naively idealistic image of science that they have constructed with a logical consistency but without consideration of the manner in which scientists actually perform. Kuhn often complained that no philosopher has ever read a technical paper of a scientist to know what he is normally doing. Though Kuhn spent the rest of his life trying to explain and persuade philosophers concerning the actual mechanism of scientific research, it was a series of fruitless argumentation.

There was an even more deep-rooted difference between Popper and Kuhn. During the interwar period, regardless of specialty there appeared a generation that was eager to defend the tradition of modern Western rational science as opposed to Nazi and Stalinist sciences. Popper, the Vienna school, Robert Merton, and even Marxists like Joseph Needham and J. D. Bernal shared such a consensus view. Professionally, the philosophy of science was grounded as an academic discipline that aimed to teach the philosophical basis of Western science at colleges and universities. This perspective lasted well into the postwar period. They took Kuhn’s attitude toward science as a challenge to their established authority and criticized him as a ‘relativist’ because he admitted the existence of plural ways of scientific development rather than extolling the absolute value of modern science. I remember that even Kuhn’s contemporaries, like Robert Cohen, accused him of doing serious damage to the philosophy of science, though the latter changed his attitude later.

On the other hand, Kuhn could not understand what philosophers meant by ‘relativism.’ What’s wrong with relativism? Kuhn belongs to the wartime generation, and was mobilized in war as a rank-and-file scientist and also saw the rise of Cold-War big sciences during the postwar period. Thus, Kuhn could not maintain such an ideal and absolutely valid picture of science. A little later, by the postwar generation of Jerry Ravetz and me, conventional science had been completely relativised.

Kuhn Back to Physics

Kuhn himself was by no means a conservative, but an ambitious liberal as his youthful days testified. When he and I were together at Harvard in 1955-56, we discussed Marxian works with Marxian terminology, though he could never be an orthodox dogmatic follower. Under the McCarthy purge that was still in the air, he once told me, “In this country if I were to say that I was ‘working on a social history of science,’ I should loose my university job.”

With his inclination for social history, I had expected him to move from philosophical debate (or rather quarrel) to the sociology of science. He did follow my advice with thanks on the point of not repeating interminable philosophical arguments, which in my view did not lead anywhere. Everybody seemed to have expected Kuhn to work in the sociology of science to become the founder of the then-called Kuhnian sociology of science. But he said to me, “I was not trained in sociology and so I shall go back to my old field of physics.”

 Then, for nearly a decade, Kuhn devoted himself to the completion of his earlier study of the Copenhagen group of physics, although he occasionally talked about philosophical problems upon request. When I told people like Barry Barnes (who wanted to follow the line of Kuhnian sociology of science), they were deeply disappointed and resented his decision that he had moved away from sociological problems.

Why and how has Kuhn made such a thematic change in his late forties? Due to his earlier experience with philosophers of science, he was so frightened to step into the new field of sociology without mastering customary use of sociological jargon. As a physics Ph.D., the language of physics language was the only one familiar to him.

Kuhn Back to Philosophy

In the late sixties, along with the rise of the student movement, the Kuhnian paradigmatic shift gave support to their anti-establishment mentality in their fundamental questioning of the conventional course of studies of science. He was at one time made a Marxian charisma together with Herbert Marcuse. But, misunderstood and intimidated, Kuhn again had not responded to the call of student radicals. In his later days, I made the following remark to him: “At the turning point of industrial civilization in the 1970s, if you had been bold enough to step outside of your philosophical outlook, you would have risen to the rank of superstar, like Levi Strauss.” He thought about this overnight and then replied, “One cannot be happy in an unintended high place.”　

Then, he tried to devote himself to completing his history of quantum physics with a very careful, if not conservative, attitude in handling the source materials. When I met him next in 1977 at Princeton, he had piled up a huge amount of manuscripts next to his desk and asked me, “I am ready to publish my quantum physics book but how many people, do you think, would really read it?” I said, “Well, one hundred or so.” He looked disappointed. The book appeared two years later with the title, Black-body theory and the quantum discontinuity, 1894-1912, which disappointed reviewers and readers due to the fact that it did not mention the “paradigm” at all.

In his last years, Kuhn came back to philosophy. In the meantime, the community of philosophers of science became much friendlier toward him; Kuhn himself learned how to use philosophical terms more carefully, so that he was fully accepted in their circle.

The main issue was his ‘Incommensurability’ thesis. Kuhn’s generation had no intention to make commensurable out of incommensurables or converge the aims of different sets of paradigmatic works, such as the Newtonian and the Einsteinian works, whereas those of the earlier generation (especially philosophers), such as Ernst Cassirer, Emile Meyerson, and even Joseph Needham, could appreciate a unified view of nature. Einstein appeared unhappy during his last interview (by I. Bernard Cohen) that logical positivists had tried, against Einstein’s own intention, to make his work commensurable with that of Newton.[5] Practicing scientists think that Newton and Einstein are different paradigms; so, why should not a third generation appear in future? There is no intrinsic barrier that deems the work of others entirely incommensurable; namely, while philosophers of science welcome commensurability, practicing scientists do not. Scientists (including Einstein and Kuhn himself[6]) who do not care about commensurability, usually valued a brand new solution incommensurable with the preceding one.

Toward post-normal science Kuhn was unique in promoting “scientific community determinism” that could not be thought of by philosophers, but he himself was not satisfied with the argument of “negotiation” among sociologists of science, in which social science was the model rather than natural science. He believed in an ontological element in natural science, but could not express it well in terms of the sociology of the scientific community.

Turning to the original direction of a social or sociological issue, Kuhn’s scheme must have certainly led, as a matter of necessary course, to the analysis of the scientific community. That is what I expected Kuhn to do. We are not satisfied directly with the old Marxist method of explaining phenomena on the history of science dogmatically in terms of only the socio-economical base. In a day when science-based technology has overwhelmingly influenced world history, the old Marxist socio-economic determinism of the 19^th-century type could not be held; but instead, big scientific paradigms like computers, internet, and life science are rapidly changing our lives in the 20th to 21st centuries, and we have to take into account another explanatory route that starts with the Kuhnian internal paradigm, then goes to the external academic community, and then still further to non-academic social sectors. I have done further study on the scientists’ immediate institutional background and the value system of a scientific community, to the extent that appeared in my Academic and Scientific Traditions.[7] But this is the area where normal academic science in the Kuhnian sense prevails.

While the Kuhnian scheme of “paradigm-normal science” can explain nicely the development of academic science, Ravetz has further extended toward a socio-economical base by coining a term “post-normal science”. We are now increasingly faced with problems that academic normal science cannot solve. Inevitably, stepping further out into social sectors, in which people other than members of scientific community like citizenry, bureaucrats and enterprises participate. They play the role of sponsor and assessors in a place of academic peer-reviewers. Badly needed is a critical structural analysis of this post-normal science, in which various factors other than academic infrastructure play more important roles at the civilizational turning-point that we are now in.[8]

(Received December 16, 2007; revised March 29, 2007)