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DOI: 10.1177/0306312712437237

2012 42: 424 originally published online 2 April 2012Social Studies of SciencePeter Dear

StructureFifty years of

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Fifty years ofStructure

Peter DearCornell University, USA

Keywordshistory of science, incommensurability, paradigm, Thomas Kuhn

The 50 years that have passed since the publication of Kuhns (1962) Structure ofScientific Revolutions (SSR) seem less oppressive when I consider that I first read thecopy that now sits before me (a pink second edition) nearly 35 years ago (Kuhn, 1970).

At that time, it was de rigueur to read it in concert with Lakatos and Musgraves (1970)

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Its quasi-disciplinary home was History and

Philosophy of Science, and its disciplinary antithesis was the philosophy of science, awell-established specialty within philosophy. This created some tension, for which

Criticism became a canonical locus. Philosophers objections focused on the issues ofincommensurability and relativism (Shapere, 1964 is characteristic). Kuhns disciplinary

self-identification at the beginning ofSSR, however, was not with philosophy: History,if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive

transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed (Kuhn, 1970: 1).

Historians of science (of the right sort) are the heroes, as they have begun to ask new

sorts of questions and to trace different, and often less than cumulative, developmental

lines for the sciences (p. 3).It seems odd, in retrospect, to realize that one of Kuhns new historians was

Alexandre Koyr, most famous for histudes galilennes (Koyr, 1940). The oddnessstems from what Steven Shapin later dubbed post-Koyran intellectualism (Shapin,

1980a: 110): Koyr soon became a watchword for an intellectualist history of scientific

ideas that seemed the antithesis of the sociological vistas opened up by SSR. In thissense, however, Kuhns own sensibilities were perhaps precisely those of most historians

of science in the 1960s and 1970s: ideas with a bit of social contextualization. Science

studies, as it emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, made of Kuhn a quite different figure. In

the vanguard of science studies, one of the most forthright uses ofSSR was Barry Barnes

Corresponding author:

Peter Dear, Department of History, Cornell University, 435 McGraw Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.

Email: [email protected]

437237 SSS42310.1177/0306312712437237DearSocial Studiesof Science012

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T.S. Kuhn and Social Science (Barnes, 1982). Tellingly, this book was not only largelyignored by historians of science, but also by Kuhn himself: it receives no notice in Kuhns

well-known 1991 Rothschild Lecture at Harvard (Kuhn, 2000), even as part of that

essays generalized condemnation of Edinburgh Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

(SSK). By that time it was too late; historians of science had been dragged into confron-tation with SSK as a post-Kuhnian historical enterprise thanks to the slightly delayed

notoriety of Shapin and Schaffers Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Shapin and Schaffer,2011 [1985]).1

The most obvious application of SSR in historical studies, one flagged by Kuhnhimself in the Postscript to the second edition of SSR (Kuhn, 1970: 176), might bethought to be the identification and investigation of scientific communities. These are,

after all, the social embodiments of a paradigm in either of Kuhns clarified senses

of disciplinary matrix or exemplar (getting down to cases confuses that mapping, of

course). But surprisingly little work of this kind has actually been done by historians ofscience, and certainly not in an explicitly Kuhnian idiom. Instead, accounts of the

sorts of things that Kuhn evidently saw as paradigm-communities in the broader sense

professional communities trained from the same textbooks continued to be rather taken

for granted by historians, even when they acknowledged their in-principle significance;

if one 19th-century physicist had been trained in a different regime than that of another

with whom he interacted, those different formations would typically be recognized

through systematic differences in doctrine rather than by sociologically enunciated

markers (bibliometrically, for example). Those many historians deserve to be let off the

hook, though; Kuhn had provided them with little guidance. Even his distinction betweenthe two kinds of paradigm provided little real sense of how big or small a paradigm com-

munity might be, or when the disciplinary matrix might have shrunk to little more than a

few internalized exemplars. In 1979 Kuhn showed his cards by leaving Princeton to

become a philosopher at MIT. I think that historians of science had long, by then, tended

to conceive of Kuhns significance in the terms that the philosophers (and Kuhn himself)

had established as central: incommensurability and relativism. He was never really a

guide to historical research except by association.

There are always exceptions, of course. Shapins (1980b) review in Isis of Gerald

GeisonsMichael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology (Geison, 1978) skew-ered its author for never having mentioned Kuhn, despite the books focus on a researchgroup, its structure and its commitments. (Thats because youve absorbed me so thor-

oughly, Kuhn was said by Geison to have commented wryly.2) Geisons subsequent

interest in related issues focused on research schools rather than paradigm communi-

ties (Geison, 1981; Geison and Holmes, 1993), and had little to say about Kuhns work

itself. Studies that focused on what might otherwise be described as the intellectual con-

tent of a Kuhnian paradigm necessarily differed little from Koyran historiography, one

of Kuhns principal models.

Evidence from absence forSSRs role in the history of science at this time may berepresented by the decline of biography as a leading historiographical mode. To under-

stand why science develops as it does, one need not unravel the details of biography and

personality that lead each individual to a particular choice, though that topic has vast

fascination, Kuhn carefully wrote in his Postscript (Kuhn, 1970: 200). It certainly seems

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that in the 1970s and 1980s the stock of scholarly biography in the history of science had

declined severely. Although books continued to appear that focused on aspects of indi-

vidual figures, prefaces routinely took care to note that this is not meant to be a

biography(see Geison, 1978: xiii). By contrast, the past 20 years have seen a resurgence

in the respectability of biographical treatments in the history of science (among the verybest examples of new historiographical departures being Porter [2004]). Nowadays, even

scientific objects have biographies (Daston, 2000).

And what ofSSRs celebration of the insulation of the scientific community fromsociety (p. 164)? Kuhn saw this as a good thing, giving scientific enterprises their

character and enabling their peculiar success. The implication that there is no society

inside science, as well as the curious Cold War, Polanyi-esque ideal of isolated, privi-

leged groups being shoveled massive funding from behind a curtain, surely created

potential conflict between Kuhn and the concerns of emergent science studies (see,

inter alia, Dear and Jasanoff, 2010). Only Kuhn, in his assaults on SSK, seems to havecared very much about this discord; most citations of his work in science studies long

ignored it (cf. Fuller, 2000). What became dubbed, in the 1970s, the social history of

science, especially associated at the time with the Department of History and

Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, had very little interest in the

detailed content of scientific knowledge, and in effect set itself at odds with Kuhns

own central concerns (for example, Kohler, 1982).

In short, it is easy to downplay the importance ofSSR for the history of science. Therarity of references to SSR in the historiography of science (as compared nowadays with

those to Leviathan and the Air-Pump) make that apparent insignificance all the moreplausible. Certainly, any historian who sits down to reread SSR will be struck by itsalmost archaic historiographical sensibilities: it really is based on Koyran intellectual

history, tricked out with a clever and beguiling structural model of science. The latter is

clearly based on a dominant US Cold-War era ideology of science as a free and demo-

cratic social institution, and elaborated with elements drawn from cognitive psychology

and the later Wittgenstein. It is a product of the 1950s, and became enormously popular

as part of the counter-cultural 1960s: Tolkien for physics students (see also Kaiser, 2011).

It remains alive today for a variety of reasons: in science studies, it holds a mythic

status (witness this special section of the journal) as the intervention that brought downthe dominance of logical empiricism in the philosophy of science and Mertonian func-

tionalism in the sociology of science, thereby clearing the way for the revolution of the

1980s, with SSK, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour. More actively, however, SSR, andKuhns work in general, has gained a surprising legitimacy in professional philosophy of

science: books and articles on Kuhn by philosophers have appeared unremittingly during

the past 20 years, and show no signs of dwindling: Kuhn is a part of the philosopher of

sciences canon (dating between Hoyningen-Huene [1993] and Wray [2011]).

But if the history of science as a distinct discipline has only a questionable relation-

ship to SSR, as an inquiry forming part of a broader science studies it surely owes SSR agreat deal (I hold questions of historical causation temporarily in abeyance). The book

made certain kinds of approaches in studying science permissible: if Kuhn could get

away with something that looked in practice rather like relativism, then so might others.

That revolution in the 1980s, involving both SSK and the US style of cultural studies, is


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Dear 427

hard to imagine without SSRs being embedded within it; furthermore, Kuhn overtlyrepresented the book as one whose arguments and evidence were those of the historian.

Consequently, Bruno Latours (1987) Science in Action appeared originally in Englishfor good reason: the anglophone science studies community, which had responded posi-

tively (especially in Britain) to Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar, 1979), must bythen have seemed the right environment for its epistemically irregular antics. The book

appeared almost as if prepackaged to be a blockbuster ofSSR dimensions, and historiansof science knew to pick it up immediately (my copy is of the first hardcover issue, with

its excessive typographical errors). A common response among historians was to inter-

pret it as a realist backsliding from the constructivistLaboratory Life, due to the entry ofScience in Actions non-human actants and a justifiable overlooking of their less-than-evident semiotic grounding. Networks, albeit not true Actor Networks, also spurred

some notice among historians, but on the whole Latours overturning of the epistemol-

ogy/ontology distinction, if it was noticed, drummed up little interest.Neither of these two prominent items in the canon of science studies is easy to evalu-

ate for its long-term influence on the practice or findings of the historically oriented

scholar nor should it be, given that influence explanations have been suspect among

historians at least since Quentin Skinners work (Skinner, 1966). Anniversaries are occa-

sions for celebration or remembrance. These books are certainly worth remembering; in

practice, theyve been celebrated for a long time.

Notes

1. Shapin and Schaffers book seems to have received a fair degree of attention among literary

scholars before, around 1990, it began to be widely cited by historians of science. See the

authors new introduction to the 2011 edition (Shapin and Schaffer, 2011).

2. Personal communication.

References

Barnes B (1982) T.S. Kuhn and Social Science. London: Macmillan.Daston L (ed.) (2000)Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Dear P and Jasanoff S (2010) Dismantling boundaries in science and technology studies.Isis 101:

759774.

Fuller S (2000) Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Geison GL (1978) Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology: The ScientificEnterprise in Late Victorian Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Geison GL (1981) Scientific change, emerging specialties, and research schools. History ofScience 19: 2040.

Geison GL and Holmes FL (eds) (1993)Research Schools: Historical Reappraisals. Osiris 8 (newseries). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hoyningen-Huene P (1993)Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhns Philosophyof Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kaiser D (2011) How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the QuantumRevival. New York: Norton.

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Kohler RE (1982) From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a BiomedicalDiscipline. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Koyr A (1940)tudes galilennes. Paris: Hermann.Kuhn TS (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kuhn TS (1970) Postscript 1969. In: Kuhn TS The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 174210.Kuhn TS (2000) The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science. In: Kuhn TS, The Road

Since Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 105120.Lakatos I and Musgrave A (eds) (1970) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Latour B (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour B and Woolgar S (1979) Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts.London: Sage.

Porter TM (2004) Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.Shapere D (1964) The structure of scientific revolutions.Philosophical Review 73: 383394.Shapin S (1980a) Social uses of science. In: Rousseau GS and Porter R (eds) The Ferment

of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 93140.

Shapin S (1980b) Untitled review essay of Geison GLMichael Foster and the Cambridge Schoolof Physiology.Isis 71: 146149.

Shapin S and Schaffer S (2011 [1985]) Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and theExperimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Shapin S and Schaffer S (2011) Up for air:Leviathan and the Air-Pump a generation on. Introduc-tion to the 2011 Edition ofShapin S and Schaffer S Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, xixl.

Skinner Q (1966) The limits of historical explanations.Philosophy 41: 199215.Wray KB (2011) Kuhns Evolutionary Social Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Biographical note

Peter Dear is Professor of History and of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University.


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