Monday, June 20, 2016

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 21 / The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S Kuhn (1962)

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 21 – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S Kuhn (1962)

The American physicist and philosopher of science coined the phrase ‘paradigm shift’

Robert McCrum
Monday 20 June 2016

homas Kuhn (1922-1996) did not invent the concept of scientific revolution, but he gave it a special meaning and created a phrase – “paradigm shift” – so popular that it received the ultimate accolade: no fewer than four New Yorker spoofings (from 1974 to 2009). On its first appearance, we find a sexy young woman in bell-bottom trousers at a Manhattan cocktail party flattering a balding metropolitan with: “Dynamite, Mr Gerston. You’re the first person I heard use the word ‘paradigm’ in real life.”

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (hereafter The Structure) commands the attention of a list such as this for its remarkable influence on our understanding of science and also its continued grip on our interpretative response to scientific history. The Structure is a work of ideas more than style (its prose can sometimes seem rather heavy going), but one might argue that Kuhn, an American physicist and philosopher of science, had triggered his own paradigm shift with the publication of this seminal monograph, a book demonstrating that however powerful science might be, it remains as flawed as the scientists who explore its many mysteries.

Kuhn’s account of science and its development differed radically from traditional versions. Previously, the standard account saw steady, cumulative “progress”. Kuhn, however, only saw discontinuities – “normal” and “revolutionary” phases in which scientific communities would be thrown into periods of crisis and uncertainty. Such revolutionary phases, Kuhn argues, correspond to those conceptual breakthroughs that lay the foundations for the periods of continuity that follow.

The Structure is very much a book of the late 20th century. It began forming in Kuhn’s mind in the late 1940s, when he was just a graduate student in theoretical physics. As is often pointed out, a book that has reshaped the philosophy of science was actually conceived and written by a physicist who, having taught an undergraduate course on “physical science for the non-scientist”, was exposed to scientific history, and (to his surprise) found his basic conceptions about the nature of the discipline radically undermined. So The Structure is, in a profound sense, a young man’s book, rooted in its time. The science it addresses is dominated by the post-Einstein physics of the cold war. Indeed, 1962, the year in which Kuhn’s ideas were first published, was also the year of the Cuban missile crisis. And while physics was undoubtedly the alpha male among the sciences when The Structure was being written, change was already afoot. With No 15 in this series, The Double Helix (1968), we have already seen how, after the 1950s, the molecular biology of DNA was set to sweep the board. Since then, biotechnology and the marriage of computer science with genetics and even neurology have become the cutting edge of scientific research.

Yet, against the odds, Kuhn remains evergreen. His great insight, which owed something to Kant, but was based on his own study of the Copernican revolution, was provocatively at odds with Karl Popper (a later entry in this series). Kuhn’s description of the dialectic of change in science (the making of a paradigm; the recognition of anomalies, with an ensuing crisis; finally, the resolution of the crisis by a new paradigm) still holds true today, albeit in a radically different intellectual environment dominated by information science and biotechnology. Kuhn’s argument for an episodic model of scientific development in which periods of continuity are interrupted by passages of revolutionary science remains disputed by some, but is widely accepted within most circles. He himself has written that, “because I insist that what scientists share is not sufficient to command uniform assent about such matters as the choice between competing theories or the distinction between an ordinary anomaly and a crisis-provoking one, I am occasionally accused of glorifying subjectivity and even irrationality.”

Disruptive eureka moments: Thomas S Kuhn.
Photograph: Bill Pierce

Kuhn’s challenge to long-standing linear notions of scientific progress and his argument that transformative ideas do not spring from a gradual process of experimentation, but from eureka moments that disrupt conventional wisdom and offer unanticipated breakthroughs, were themselves a revolution. If turning a world of thought upside down is the mark of a superior paradigm, then The Structure has been, for more than half a century now, a howling success. As the Observer’s John Naughton has written:“A Google search for [the phrase paradigm shift] returns more than 10m hits.” More significantly, it scores a reference inside no fewer than 18,300 titles sold by Amazon. Kuhn’s scholarly monograph, says Naughton, is also “one of the most cited academic books of all time. If ever a big idea went viral, this is it”.

Kuhn’s Structure continues to be hugely influential in the history of science and in many related areas (economics, sociology, philosophy and history). Since publication, it has sold more than 1.4m copies, been widely translated and is routinely listed as one of the books most frequently cited in the arts and humanities of the latter half of the 20th century. In highbrow commentary, lowbrow marketing and psephological analysis, “paradigm shift” has become a cliche of social and political change.

A signature sentence

“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.”