The Incommensurability Thesis and the Status of Knowledge

A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were-and still are. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. And fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn challenged long-standing linear notions of scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don't arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation, but that revolutions in those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of normal science, as he called it. Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in our biotech age. This new edition of Kuhn's essential work in the history of science includes an insightful introductory essay by Ian Hacking that clarifies terms popularized by Kuhn, including paradigm and incommensurability, and applies Kuhn's ideas to the science of today. Usefully keyed to the separate sections of the book, Hacking's essay provides important background information as well as a contemporary context. Newly designed, with an expanded index, this edition will be eagerly welcomed by the next generation of readers seeking to understand the history of our perspectives on science.

Thomas Kuhn (1922-96) transformed the philosophy of science. His seminal 1962 work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" introduced the term 'paradigm shift' into the vernacular and remains a fundamental text in the study of the history and philosophy of science. This introduction to Kuhn's ideas covers the breadth of his philosophical work, situating "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" within Kuhn's wider thought and drawing attention to the development of his ideas over time. Kuhn's work is assessed within the context of other philosophies of science notably logical empiricism and recent developments in naturalized epistemology. The author argues that Kuhn's thinking betrays a residual commitment to many theses characteristic of the empiricists he set out to challenge. Kuhn's influence on the history and philosophy of science is assessed and where the field may be heading in the wake of Kuhn's ideas is explored.

Preface Note on the third impression 1. Logic of discovery of psychology of research? T. S. Kuhn 2. Against 'Normal Science' J. W. N. Watkins 3. Does the distinction between normal and revolutionary science hold water? S. E. Toulmin 4. Normal science, scientific revolutions and the history of science L. Pearce Williams 5. Normal science and its dangers K. R. Popper 6. The nature of a paradigm Margaret Masterman 7. Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes I. Lakatos 8. Consolations for the specialist P. K. Feyerabend 9. Reflections on my critics T. S. Kuhn Index.

Notes on Contributors

Dear participant of Tirana Architecture Week, In his famous book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (1962), the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, coined the notion of ‘paradigm shift’, intended as a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. In opposition to the activity of ‘normal science’, a ‘shift’ occurs when the current predominant paradigm, under which scientific activities are conducted becomes incompatible due to new phenomena, facilitating the research – and adoption – of a new theory or paradigm. We can also assume that, such a critical change is often driven by a ‘crisis’, a transitional moment where the appearance of new technologies, environmental conditions (ex. climate change), or political situations (ex. migration phenomena), requires the a drastic rift from the past and opens the way to a reformulation of the notion of the so-called ‘Modernity’. Indeed, according to the words of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard: «Modernity … is what transforms crisis into a value, a contradictory moral, says Baudrillard, for it gives rise to an aesthetics of rupture». The history of Architecture and Design itself, can be also interpreted as a consequential stream of changes following the research of a new paradigm. The Industrial Revolution deeply influenced the work of professionals during the whole XX Century, leading to the appearance of an architecture that could be a response to the industry preferring a free and functional arrangement of bodies rather than typological preset; transparencyrather than opaqueness, points structures rather than tectonic configurations. In the last thirty years, with the development of computers and ICT technologies, another paradigm has raised and changed these disciplines from their inner structures. The IT Revolution has imposed itself as the central element for a new phase in all of architecture, and information hasbecome the essential component of a new way of designing and a new urban environment. A whole generation of architects has been dealing with the purpose of transferring the dynamic interconnection at the heart of IT from the digital world to a new reality of reactive, sensitive, interactivearchitectures. The aim of Tirana Architecture Week 2020 is to draw current research and design practices, as well as theoretical speculations on therelationship between the paradigm shifts in science and urbanism; in other words about the science and the city. Such mandate will be addressedin multiple scales and contexts, and from different perspectives within different fields of interest, directly or indirectly related to design, architecture, urban studies, sociology, environmental research, engineering, education and pedagogy.

The success of Thomas Kuhn's work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in circles to which it was not initially addressed is particularly striking in the case of economics. In the last years, studies applying the Kuhnian framework to economic science have flourished, and no discussion about the history of economic theories takes place without at least a reference to Kuhn.' Undoubtedly, his ideas have provided the basis for a fresh look at the sociological factors affecting the development of economic thought. This is developed by Benjamin Ward in the following way:

This special topic issue includes a collection of seven articles on visualizing scientific paradigms. All articles in this special issue reflect the influence of Thomas Kuhn’s structure of scientific revolutions on our understanding of the growth of scientific knowledge. On the other hand, each article represents a unique perspective of how one may pursue the quest for transforming something as intangible and empirically evasive as invisible colleges and competing paradigms into something that is more accessible and traceable to scholars and professions of various disciplines, ranging from historians, philosophers, and educators to scientists and engineers. The opening article is Henry Small’s personal account of the endeavor in probing scientific paradigms using science mapping. His article, entitled “Paradigms, Citations and Maps of Science: A Personal History,” provides a valuable introduction to the key issues involved in this area and reveals an overview of promising avenues as well as challenging routes. He identifies an emerging trend that reflects and redefines Kuhn’s paradigms and emphasizes the empirical viability of research methodologies in understanding the growth of scientific knowledge. He suggests that revolutionary and normal science should be seen as extremes on a continuum of rates of change rather than, as Kuhn originally asserted, as an all-or-none proposition. The second and third articles take a prominent historical perspective in depicting the evolution of scientific citations. Eugene Garfield and his collaborators’ article is entitled “Why Do We Need Algorithmic Historiography?” They explain the rationale for creating HistCite, their new program that produces historiographs of scholarly topics. These historiographs help analysts and historians identify key events, people, and journals in a particular field. Scholars can evaluate the evolution of a scientific paradigm by studying the genealogic profile of such evolution. The third article is entitled “Timeline Visualization of Research Fronts.” Steven Morris and his colleagues focus on temporal changes in research fronts and explain the power of timeline visualizations. They first cluster documents into research fronts based on bibliographic coupling and then visualize research fronts using horizontal timeline tracks. Documents from research fronts are plotted along corresponding timeline tracks. Because time line visualizations can reveal temporal relations among research fronts and their member documents, time lines are potentially useful tools in identifying new research fronts as well as existing research expertise and research excellence. Although both the fourth and fifth articles have connections to Pathfinder networks, they address different topics. Howard White’s article, entitled “Pathfinder Networks and Author Cocitation Analysis: A Remapping of Paradigmatic Information Scientists,” clarifies an important methodological issue, whereas Chen and Kuljis focus on a general framework for visualizing scientific paradigms in their article. Author Cocitation Analysis (ACA) is a long established methodology for studying intellectual structures. Researchers have routinely used Pearson correlation coefficients rather than raw cocitation counts as the measure of similarity between author pairs. Howard White compellingly demonstrates the advantages of using raw cocitation counts in Pathfinder network visualizations of author cocitation structures. He compares Pathfinder networks of the information scientists derived from raw cocitation counts and Pearson correlation coefficients, respectively. In the fifth article “The Rising Landscape: A Visual Exploration of Superstring Revolutions in Physics,” Chen and Kuljis introduce a general framework for visualizing the growth of scientific paradigms based on Kuhn’s theory on scientific revolutions. They illustrate the use of this framework in a case study of superstring revolutions in physics. The evolution of cocitation networks is depicted and explained through animated visualizations of citations and cocitation links. Visual-spatial properties as well as structural patterns associated with superstring revolutions are identified. The sixth and seventh articles deal with heterogeneous data sources. In their article entitled “Indicator-Assisted Evaluation and Funding of Research: Visualizing the Influ© 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Anyone who works at the interstices of intellectual history and philosophy and the history and philosophy of science will be quick to rank Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions amongst the most influential works of the last half-century. But its influence extends well beyond these disciplines as well. First published in 1962 as a contribution to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, over the last fifty years it has enjoyed a rich afterlife, leaving in its wake an immense if contested inventory of ideas whose significance has transcended the well-policed boundaries that often separate the natural sciences from the social sciences and the humanities. Even more surprising for a book of its academic character, it has enjoyed a reception in popular discourse that exceeds its disciplinary bailiwick. Its trademark terms—not only the celebrated ideas of a paradigm and a paradigm shift but also more technical themes such as normal science, incommensurability, and anomaly—have been naturalized into mundane English with a degree of success that puts to shame just about any other work of recent scholarship. Paraphrasing one of its characteristic claims, one may be temped to observe that, since the publication of Kuhn's Structure, we all live in a different world.

Scientific revolution and the clinico-pathological paradigm In this edition of Population Health Metrics, a series of papers describes new, automated methods for analyzing verbal autopsy questionnaires. Are we witnessing a revolution in the computer-based analysis of verbal autopsies? The use of the word, revolution, brings to mind Thomas Kuhn’s seminal essay, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962, and his concept of the scientific paradigm [1]. Verbal autopsies, as we now know them, are not a new concept, but rather are late developments within the clinico-pathological paradigm that displaced the humoral theory of disease in the late 18 and early 19 centuries. We could mark the beginnings of this scientific revolution from the publication in 1761 of Morgagni’s The Seats and Causes of Disease Investigated by Anatomy [2]. Encyclopedic in scope, it is over 2,000 pages in length in its English translation. His general plan is to present symptom histories of patients who had died, describe the findings at autopsy, speculate on the likely causal relationships between pathology and symptoms, and finally to discuss similar cases found in a literature extending back from recent centuries to the ancients. The first level of classification is by the three major body cavities (head, thorax, and belly [sic]) and surgery; the second level is by symptom group. At the end of the three volumes are his indices, which he regarded as critical: one of these lists symptoms alphabetically, cross-referencing them to the pathology of disease case-by-case; another lists pathological lesions, similarly cross-referencing them to symptom histories. His underlying thesis, that clinical symptoms reflect organ dysfunction, was not to be fully accepted for over half a century. This thesis can be briefly stated, but it is the sheer weight of evidence, somewhat in the manner of The Origin of Species, that makes his case. That was not his only purpose: he wanted this to be a working manual (albeit a very large one) for physicians and anatomists. Equally, we could mark the endpoint of this scientific revolution with the publication in 1819 of another massive work Laennec’s A Treatise on Diseases of the Chest [3]. Laennec argued that the symptom history was inaccurate. Using his new invention, the stethoscope, he linked detailed auscultatory findings to autopsy findings of pulmonary pathology. All of modern medicine rests upon this linkage. Morgagni validated pathological anatomy as the cause of disease by using the symptom history as his gold standard. Sixty years later, Laennec dismissed the symptom history as inaccurate and validated auscultation using pathological anatomy as his gold standard. In the course of this paradigm shift, pathology had been moved from the margins of the medical solar system to its heart. In Foucault’s words, “The space of configuration of the disease” was now superimposed “upon the space of the localization of illness.” [4] Medical practice in the 18 century had depended heavily on what we would now call unstructured symptom histories. Physical examination was limited in the main to the observation of the fully clothed patient and palpation of the pulse. Laennec’s work led to a wave of enthusiasm for auscultation to the exclusion of other methods of diagnosis. In attempting to restore balance, Pierre Louis “initiated a method of clinical teaching based on precise observation and statistical analysis.” He began the structuring of the clinical history by introducing direct questioning. In the words of Stanley Reiser [5]:

Headaches are characterized by a sensation of discomfort or pain in the cephalicregion. Due to the large number of types and subtypes of headaches, the standardization of their approach is necessary through the International Classification ofHeadache Disorders (ICHD), a document that is currently in its 3rd edition (ICHD-3).The evolution of the ICHD follows the hypothetical-deductive model of science basedon Karl Popper's philosophy, which has a strong presence in the health sciences.The classification of headaches has evolved over time, incorporating and removingcriteria, reflecting the need to adapt the classification to constantly evolving scientificand clinical demands. However, some changes can generate discrepancies betweenclinical practice and the elaborated diagnostic tools. In this context, this article reflectson whether it would be advantageous to return to old principles and foundations ofobsolete classifications. The criterion of osmophobia, which is no longer in use inICHD-3, is highlighted. This reflection can be developed following Thomas Kuhn's(1922-1996) view on science. In his main work, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"(1962), Kuhn proposes a three-stage model for science: the adoption of a paradigm,normal science, and a period of crisis. Kuhn also proposes the principle of incommensurability to understand the limitations and complexities of science. The applicationof this principle allows headache specialists to recognize that different approachesto headache classification have their own limitations and complexities, encouragingthem to consider a variety of perspectives, paradigms, and theories in approachingclinical cases and conducting scientific studies. An integrative approach that combinesPopper's hypothetical-deductive model with Kuhn's principle of incommensurabilityallows headache specialists to have a broader and more critical understanding ofheadache classifications.

ural science is moving closer to history rather than vice-versa. At this point, he invokes Kuhn and his paradigm, having already spoken of the two-culture problem and about to speak of E.O. Wilson and his book, Consilience. We need to pause, however. While Kuhn is fashionable, his theses have not stood up well to criticism. Historians of science have questioned his work. Kuhn himselfexpressed doubts after its publication. We who follow upon his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions should do likewise. Indeed, it can be argued that the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century incorporated not only the novel theories of Galileo and Newton, but established the basic outlines of scientific method, which, suitably modified, would amend the initial paradigms. Adherence to scientific method still persists. So, too, with Wilson and Consilience. This noteworthy effort to unify the sciences suffers from false understanding of the notion of consilience as introduced by William Whewell and then exemplified in the work of Darwin. Clearly, invocation of such figures as Kuhn and Wilson from the natural sciences must be accompanied by constant critique. The same is true for metaphors. When Christian mixes them as he does speaking of a huge super-organism consisting of all humans, and few sentences later ofthe super-continent of modern humanity, we must ask which is the one that is most valid as we try to do history. Or else, what purpose does each serve that the other does not?

Between Carnival and Lent: The Scientific Revolution at the Margins of Culture Paula Findlen (bio) How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about the world! And it is all so novel, too. E. A. Burtt In the half-century since the “Scientific Revolution” became a meaningful description of the transformation of attitudes toward nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it seems to have enjoyed more lives than the Cheshire cat and to have remained as enigmatic. 1 Since its original formulation in the late 1940s, it has been the topic of a lively debate about the origins and character of modern approaches to nature and, more generally, knowledge. The result has been not only increased skepticism that the Scientific Revolution could be reduced to any single narrative, but also a profusion [End Page 243] of narratives about what constituted its fundamental characteristics. As Hayden White observes, “any given set of real events can be emplotted in a number of ways, can bear the weight of being told as any number of different stories.” 2 In the process, the Scientific Revolution, perhaps more than any other area of science studies, has become a testing ground for new approaches to the historical understanding of science and new ways of understanding the process of scientific change. Why should we feel so compelled to tell and retell this particular story in the history of science, when there are so many other episodes worthy of our attention? Surely part of the fascination lies in the sense that the Scientific Revolution is, in many respects, the original story in the history of science. From the sixteenth century onward, humanist natural philosophers—from the anatomist Andreas Vesalius to the astronomer Johannes Kepler—wrote the histories of various sciences in order to publicize the importance of their reformation of knowledge. By the eighteenth century they had become the story, protagonists of a narrative rewritten by new scholarly communities in search of modern ruptures with the past. 3 The crafting of scientific narrative has been a prolonged and self-conscious exercise in which scientists as well as historians have participated over the centuries—all the more so because neither the scientist nor the historian enjoyed distinct intellectual identities until fairly recently (quite often, as the case of the seventeenth-century statesman, historian, and natural philosopher Francis Bacon demonstrates well, they were the same person). Accordingly, we might see the Scientific Revolution as one of the fundamental experiments in narrating the history of science. While the grand narrative of the Scientific Revolution has largely been a story of the rise of modern science that takes science in a fairly defined sense as its focal point, cultural approaches to the history of science suggest a variety of other possibilities that explore in greater detail the imagery that early modern Europeans had at their disposal when they attempted to describe nature. Such imagery was [End Page 244] not simply an afterthought to the study of nature; often it was so deeply embedded in the act of seeing and understanding nature that it would be impossible to separate how a particular natural philosopher viewed nature from how he viewed culture. 4 Defining nature and defining culture were complementary activities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If we wish to truly understand what it meant to do early modern science, then we need to think more carefully about what it meant to be early modern. The approach I am suggesting has already had a number of advocates. Several years ago, John Schuster remarked that “the Scientific Revolution consisted of a process of change and displacement among and within competing systems of natural philosophy,” and he recommended that historians look more carefully at the “privileged images, metaphors or models” that defined these different approaches to knowledge. 5 The literature exploring the fundamental cultural themes of the early modern period can be a rich resource for expanding our interpretations of the Scientific Revolution. 6 Since nature was never an isolated subject of study during this period but always part of some larger project, we should examine more closely those features of early modern society that best illuminate the place of...

Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a book that philosophers love to hate. With over a million copies sold it is one of the most popular books in twentieth century philosophy, yet most work in philosophy of science has been aimed at dismissing or at least modifying Kuhn. On the other hand, and much to Kuhn’s own horror, ‘‘social studies of science’’ have embraced Kuhn’s alleged skeptical consequences. In the 1990’s these opposing views between realists and constructivists collided in a disciplinewide debate called the ‘‘Science Wars’’. After the turn of the century, however, interest in Kuhn’s ideas seems to have waned. The topics got old and perhaps philosophers just grew tired of looking back. With no synthesis in sight, the relative calm suggests they agreed to disagree, leaving the discipline in a state of fragmentation. Now that the new century is well under way, the 50th anniversary of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a good occasion to look ahead and ask what the role of Kuhn’s legacy can be in twenty first century philosophy of science. This issue of Topoi addresses this question with a mix of tradition and innovation. It brings together contributions by senior scholars who have themselves, like Kuhn, helped shape twentieth century philosophy of science, and young academics on whom the burden falls of shaping that of the 21th. Their contributions fall into two groups, those looking to refine Kuhn’s ideas and those ready to implement them. Hanne Andersen extends Kuhn’s ‘‘Essential Tension’’ between tradition and innovation within mono-disciplinary science with a complementary tension between intellectual dependence and critical scrutiny versus epistemic dependence and trust in interdisciplinary science. Dunja Seselja and Christian Straber develop Kuhn’s account of theory choice based on the evaluation of pursuit worthiness. They argue that dropping the account of epistemic semantic monism inherent in Kuhn’s ideas will yield richer notions of persuasion, interpretation and pluralism. William Rehg provides an interpretation of Kuhn’s ideas in terms of collective intentionality and argues this allows to save Kuhn’s conception of normal and revolutionary science without having to rely on meaning holism and incommensurability. Howard Sankey proposes to sharpen Kuhn’s account by adding to Kuhn’s later rejection of methodological incommensurability a particularist and naturalist conception of epistemic normativity in order to take away the sceptical basis for epistemic relativism. Jerry Doppelt asks what form of realism is still possible given Kuhn’s characterization of the process of theory change. In response to this challenge he develops and defends a ‘best current theory’ realism. While Ronald Giere argues that Kuhn’s later position is in line with his own account of perspectival realism. Visions for the future implementation of Kuhn’s ideas are developed in different directions. Some articles see Kuhn’s future as offering a new paradigm for philosophy of science, others see it as a bridge between philosophy and other fields or as a tool with applications to specific philosophical problems. Joseph Rouse calls attention to a number of less commonly recognized aspects of Kuhn’s work. Some of them indicate that Kuhn was an important precursor to subsequent philosophical developments. But Rouse also looks ahead and cites three overlooked themes that hold opportunities for future research, insisting that the Kuhnian revolution in philosophy of science still has to R. De Langhe (&) Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS), Tilburg University, Warandelaan 2, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands e-mail: rogierdelanghe@gmail.com

Was there a Darwinian Revolution? Yes, no, and maybe!

Notes on Contributors