The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change
390
The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change
390Paperback(New Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226458069 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 03/15/1979 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 390 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d) |
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The Essential Tension
Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change
By Thomas S. Kuhn
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 1977 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-45806-9
CHAPTER 1
The Relations between the History and the Philosophy of Science
Previously unpublished Isenberg Lecture, delivered at Michigan State University, 1 March 1968; revised October 1976.
The subject on which I have been asked to speak today is the relations between the history and the philosophy of science. For me, more than for most, it has deep personal as well as intellectual significance. I stand before you as a practicing historian of science. Most of my students mean to be historians, not philosophers. I am a member of the American Historical, not the American Philosophical, Association. But for almost ten years after I first encountered philosophy as a college freshman, it was my primary avocational interest, and I often considered making it my vocation, displacing theoretical physics, the only field in which I can claim to have been properly trained. Throughout those years, which lasted until around 1948, it never occurred to me that history or history of science could hold the slightest interest. To me then, as to most scientists and philosophers still, the historian was a man who collects and verifies facts about the past and who later arranges them in chronological order. Clearly the production of chronicles could have little appeal to someone whose fundamental concerns were with deductive inference and fundamental theory.
I shall later ask why the image of the historian as chronicler has such special appeal to both philosophers and scientists. Its continued and selective attraction is not due either to coincidence or to the nature of history, and it may therefore prove especially revealing. But my present point is still autobiographical. What drew me belatedly from physics and philosophy to history was the discovery that science, when encountered in historical source materials, seemed a very different enterprise from the one implicit in science pedagogy and explicit in standard philosophical accounts of scientific method. History might, I realized with astonishment, be relevant to the philosopher of science and perhaps also to the epistemologist in ways that transcended its classic role as a source of examples for previously occupied positions. It might, that is, prove to be a particularly consequential source of problems and of insights. Therefore, though I became a historian, my deepest interests remained philosophical, and in recent years those interests have become increasingly explicit in my published work. To an extent, then, I do both history and philosophy of science. Of course I therefore think about the relation between them, but I also live it, which is not the same thing. That duality of my involvement will inevitably be reflected in the way I approach today's topic. From this point my talk will divide into two quite different, though closely related parts. The first is a report, often quite personal, of the difficulties to be encountered in any attempt to draw the two fields closer together. The second, which deals with problems more explicitly intellectual, argues that the rapprochement is fully worth the quite special effort it requires.
Few members of this audience will need to be told that, at least in the United States, the history and the philosophy of science are separate and distinct disciplines. Let me, from the very start, develop reasons for insisting that they be kept that way. Though a new sort of dialogue between these fields is badly needed, it must be inter- not intra-disciplinary. Those of you aware of my involvement with Princeton University's Program in History and Philosophy of Science may find odd my insistence that there is no such field. At Princeton, however, the historians and the philosophers of science pursue different, though overlapping, courses of study, take different general examinations, and receive their degrees from different departments, either history or philosophy. What is particularly admirable in that design is that it provides an institutional basis for a dialogue between fields without subverting the disciplinary basis of either.
Subversion is not, I think, too strong a term for the likely result of an attempt to make the two fields into one. They differ in a number of their central constitutive characteristics, of which the most general and apparent is their goals. The final product of most historical research is a narrative, a story, about particulars of the past. In part it is a description of what occurred (philosophers and scientists often say, a mere description). Its success, however, depends not only on accuracy but also on structure. The historical narrative must render plausible and comprehensible the events it describes. In a sense to which I shall later return, history is an explanatory enterprise; yet its explanatory functions are achieved with almost no recourse to explicit generalizations. (I may point out here, for later exploitation, that when philosophers discuss the role of covering laws in history, they characteristically draw their examples from the work of economists and sociologists, not of historians. In the writings of the latter, lawlike generalizations are extraordinarily hard to find.) The philosopher, on the other hand, aims principally at explicit generalizations and at those with universal scope. He is no teller of stories, true or false. His goal is to discover and state what is true at all times and places rather than to impart understanding of what occurred at a particular time and place.
Each of you will want to articulate and to qualify those crass generalizations, and some of you will recognize that they raise deep problems of discrimination. But few will feel that distinctions of this sort are entirely empty, and I therefore turn from them to their consequences. It is these that make the distinction of aims important. To say that history of science and philosophy of science have different goals is to suggest that no one can practice them both at the same time. But it does not suggest that there are also great difficulties about practicing them alternately, working from time to time on historical problems and attacking philosophical issues in between. Since I obviously aim at a pattern of that sort myself, I am committed to the belief that it can be achieved. But it is nonetheless important to recognize that each switch is a personal wrench, the abandonment of one discipline for another with which it is not quite compatible. To train a student simultaneously in both would risk depriving him of any discipline at all. Becoming a philosopher is, among other things, acquiring a particular mental set toward the evaluation both of problems and of the techniques relevant to their solution. Learning to be a historian is also to acquire a special mental set, but the outcome of the two learning experiences is not at all the same. Nor, I think, is a compromise possible, for it presents problems of the same sort as a compromise between the duck and the rabbit of the well-known Gestalt diagram. Though most people can readily see the duck and the rabbit alternately, no amount of ocular exercise and strain will educe a duck-rabbit.
That view of the relation between enterprises is not at all the one I had at the time of my conversion to history twenty years ago. Rather it derives from much subsequent experience, sometimes painful, as a teacher and writer. In the former role I have, for example, repeatedly taught graduate seminars in which prospective historians and philosophers read and discussed the same classic works of science and philosophy. Both groups were conscientious and both completed the assignments with care, yet it was often difficult to believe that both had been engaged with the same texts. Undoubtedly the two had looked at the same signs, but they had been trained (programmed, if you will) to process them differently. Inevitably, it was the processed signs — for example their reading notes or their memory of the text — rather than the signs themselves that provided the basis for their reports, paraphrases, and contributions to discussion.
Subtle analytic distinctions that had entirely escaped the historians would often be central when the philosophers reported on their reading. The resulting confrontations were invariably educational for the historians, but the fault was not always theirs. Sometimes the distinctions dwelt upon by the philosophers were not to be found at all in the original text. They were products of the subsequent development of science or philosophy, and their introduction during the philosophers' processing of signs altered the argument. Or again, listening to the historians' paraphrase of a position, the philosophers would often point out gaps and inconsistencies that the historians had failed to see. But the philosophers could then sometimes be shocked by the discovery that the paraphrase was accurate, that the gaps were there in the original. Without quite knowing they were doing so, the philosophers had improved the argument while reading it, knowing what its subsequent form must be. Even with the text open before them it was regularly difficult and sometimes impossible to persuade them that the gap was really there, that the author had not seen the logic of the argument quite as they did. But if the philosophers could be brought to see that much, they could usually see something more important as well — that what they took to be gaps had in fact been introduced by analytic distinctions they had themselves supplied, that the original argument, if no longer viable philosophy, was sound in its own terms. At this point the whole text might begin to look different to them. Both the extent of the transformation and the pedagogic difficulty in deliberately bringing it about are reminiscent of the Gestalt switch.
Equally impressive, as evidence of different processing, was the range of textual material noticed and reported by the two groups. The historians always ranged more widely. Important parts of their reconstructions might, for example, be built upon passages in which the author had introduced a metaphor designed, he said, "to aid the reader." Or again, having noticed an apparent error or inconsistency in the text, the historian might spend some time explaining how a brilliant man could have slipped in this way. What aspect of the author's thought, the historian would ask, can be discovered by noting that an inconsistency obvious to us was invisible to him and was perhaps no inconsistency at all? For the philosophers, trained to construct an argument, not to reconstruct historical thought, both metaphors and errors were irrelevant and were sometimes not noticed at all. Their concern, which they pursued with a subtlety, skill, and persistence seldom found among the historians, was the explicit philosophical generalization and the arguments that could be educed in its defense. As a result, the papers they submitted at the end of the term were regularly shorter and usually far more coherent than those produced by the historians. But the latter, though often analytically clumsy, usually came far closer to reproducing the major conceptual ingredients in the thought of the men the two groups had studied together. The Galileo or Descartes who appeared in the philosophers' papers was a better scientist or philosopher but a less plausible seventeenth-century figure than the figure presented by the historians.
I have no quarrel with either of these modes of reading and reporting. Both are essential components as well as central products of professional training. But the professions are different, and they quite properly put different first things first. For the philosophers in my seminars the priority tasks were, first, to isolate the central elements of a philosophical position and, then, to criticize and develop them. Those students were, if you will, honing their wits against the developed opinions of their greatest predecessors. Many of them would continue to do so in their later professional life. The historians, on the other hand, were concerned with the viable and the general only in the forms that had, in fact, guided the men they studied. Their first concern was to discover what each one had thought, how he had come to think it, and what the consequences had been for him, his contemporaries, and his successors. Both groups thought of themselves as attempting to grasp the essentials of a past philosophical position, but their ways of doing the job were conditioned by the primary values of their separate disciplines, and their results were often correspondingly distinct. Only if the philosophers were converted to history or the historians to philosophy did additional work produce significant convergence.
A quite different sort of evidence of a deep interdisciplinary divide depends upon testimony so personal that it may convince only its author. Nevertheless, because the experience from which it derives is comparatively rare, the testimony seems worth recording. I have myself, at various times, written articles in physics, in history, and in something resembling philosophy. In all three cases the process of writing proves disagreeable, but the experience is not in other respects the same. By the time one begins to write a physics paper, the research is finished. Everything one needs is ordinarily contained in one's notes. The remaining tasks are selection, condensation, and translation to clear English. Usually only the last presents difficulties, and they are not ordinarily severe.
The preparation of a historical paper is different, but there is one important parallel. A vast amount of research has to be done before one begins to write. Books, documents, and other records must be located and examined; notes must be taken, organized, and organized again. Months or years may go into work of this sort. But the end of such work is not, as it is in science, the end of the creative process. Selected and condensed notes cannot simply be strung together to make a historical narrative. Furthermore, though chronology and narrative structure usually permit the historian to write steadily from notes and an outline for a considerable period, there are almost always key points at which his pen or typewriter refuses to function and his undertaking comes to a dead stop. Hours, days, or weeks later he discovers why he has been unable to proceed. Though his outline tells him what comes next, and though his notes provide all requisite information about it, there is no viable transition to that next part of the narrative from the point at which he has already arrived. Elements essential to the connection have been omitted from an earlier part of his story because at that point the narrative structure did not demand them. The historian must therefore go back, sometimes to documents and notetaking, and rewrite a substantial part of his paper in order that the connection to what comes next may be made. Not until the last page is written can he be altogether sure that he will not have to start again, perhaps from the very beginning.
Only the last part of this description applies to the preparation of an article in philosophy, and there the periods of circling back are far more frequent and the concomitant frustrations far more intense. Only the man whose memory span permits him to compose a whole paper in his head can hope for long periods of uninterrupted composition. But if the actual writing of philosophy shows some parallels to history, what comes before is altogether distinct. Excepting in the history of philosophy and perhaps in logic, there is nothing like the historian's period of preparatory research; in the literal sense there is in most of philosophy no equivalent for research at all. One starts with a problem and a clue to its solution, both often encountered in the criticism of the work of some other philosopher. One worries it — on paper, in one's head, in discussions with colleagues — waiting for the point at which it will feel ready to be written down. More often than not that feeling proves mistaken, and the worrying process begins again, until finally the article is born. To me, at least, that is what it feels like, as though the article had come all at once, not seriatim like the pieces of historical narrative.
If, however, there is nothing quite like research in philosophy, there is something else that takes its place and that is virtually unknown in physics and in history. Considering it will take us back directly to the differences between the perceptions and behaviors of the two groups of students in my seminars. Philosophers regularly criticize each other's work and the work of their predecessors with care and skill. Much of their discussion and publication is in this sense Socratic: it is a juxtaposition of views forged from each other through critical confrontation and analysis. The critic who proclaimed that philosophers live by taking in each other's washing was unsympathetic, but he caught something essential about the enterprise. What he caught was, in fact, what the philosophers in my seminars were doing: forging their own positions by an analytic confrontation with, in this case, the past. In no other field, I think, does criticism play so central a role. Scientists sometimes correct bits of each other's work, but the man who makes a career of piecemeal criticism is ostracized by the profession. Historians, too, sometimes suggest corrections, and they also occasionally direct diatribes at competing schools whose approach to history they disdain. But careful analysis is, in those circumstances, rare, and an explicit attempt to capture and preserve the novel insights generated by the other school is almost unknown. Though influenced in extremely important ways by the work of his predecessors and his colleagues, the individual historian, like the physicist and unlike the philosopher, forges his work from primary source material, from data that he has engaged in his research. Criticism may take the place of research, but the two are not equivalent, and they produce disciplines of very different sorts.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Essential Tension by Thomas S. Kuhn. Copyright © 1977 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceI. Historiographic Studies
1. The Relations between the History and the Philosophy of Science
2. Concepts of Cause in the Development of Physics
3. Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science
4. Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery
5. The History of Science
6. The Relations between History and the History of Science
II. Metahistorical Studies
7. The Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery
8. The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science
9. The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research?
10. A Function for Thought Experiments
11. Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research
12. Second Thoughts on Paradigms
13. Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice
14. Comment on the Relations of Science and Art
Index