From: "John Corcoran" Subject: Scientific revolutions 316.1 Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 17:26:23 -0400 Dear Colleague, Many thanks to all who helped to improve the first two drafts, especially Oswaldo Chateaubriand, Joseph Corcoran, Peter Hare, Amanda Hicks, Daniel Merrill, and Mary Mulhern. Attached is the third draft, which answers all objections so far raised-to the best of my knowledge. If you disagree, let me know. Your frank comments and suggestions are welcome, whether philosophical, historical, grammatical, or typographical. Many thanks, John PS Please reread with a fresh mindset. I am painfully aware that not every innovation is an improvement. I also know that fixing one thing can bollix another or make previous flaws more evident. ========================================================================= EAP Encyclopedia of American Philosophy Scientific revolutions John Corcoran, Philosophy, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-4150 E-mail: corcoran@buffalo.edu Historians of science find abrupt and far-reaching changes in the course of the development of a given "science", or cumulative investigation of a given "domain". In those cases where basic techniques, assumptions, or viewpoints are or appear to be radically revised or replaced, the vague and metaphorical expression scientific revolution might be warranted. A paradigm case is the Copernican Revolution in astronomy. Before the revolution astronomers described the trajectories of the planets in reference to a coordinate system centered on the earth; afterwards they referred their observations to a system fixed in the sun. A much earlier case is the Thalesian Revolution in geometry. Before the revolution geometers relied almost exclusively on observation and intuition; afterwards logical deduction including reductio ad absurdum was prominently added to the arsenal of geometric weaponry. For some centuries now, philosophers have regarded scientific revolutions as being particularly germane to their concerns. Kant mentioned both of the above revolutions in his Critique of Pure Reason. Scientific revolutions often mark what many view as scientific progress, but others see them as indicative of irrational elements in science. Given that sciences are human social institutions, we should not expect sharp boundaries or precise concepts. As a rule, the pre-revolutionary form of a science continues into and through the revolutionary period, and it coexists with the post-revolutionary form, perhaps in a diminished state, into the post-revolutionary period. In some cases, it is not clear whether a single science has been revolutionized or whether a new science has been created alongside the old one. In any given case, historians must delimit "the science" in question, they must judge how abrupt and far-reaching the change was, and how extensive was the penetration of the revolutionary features. Given the ambiguities of the crucial words and the vagueness of their various meanings, we can expect to find the appearance of wide discrepancies between accounts of the history of one "science". Where one historian sees a few long stable periods punctuated by a few major revolutions, another may find several short stable periods punctuated by a several rather minor revolutions, and yet another might find a relatively smooth though sometimes bumpy evolution. Moreover, of course, we should not rule out the possibility that such differences are to be explained as much in terms of the historians' subjective tolerance or enthusiasm for excitement as in terms of substantive disagreements about objective historical fact. The expression 'scientific revolution' carries conflicting connotations, which might account for some of its popularity. For years, if not centuries, the word 'scientific' connoted the highest level of rigor, caution, objectivity, and courageous devotion to truth. However, the word 'revolution' sometimes suggested a pre-existing establishment having an entrenched hierarchy with power, privilege, prestige, and wealth that was more concerned to perpetuate itself than to criticize itself. Such organizations are sometimes more interested in recruiting loyal followers using increasingly intricate methods of indoctrination than in producing autonomous investigators who will critically assess received views and follow their own insights and deductions. Rigor and caution can be transformed into ritual rigidity and stubborn dogmatism. Interest in the topic was heightened in the 1960s with the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), perhaps one of the most influential works in historiography of science. This work not only revolutionized thinking about scientific revolutions, but it also revolutionized the language in which this topic is discussed. The expression Kuhnian Revolution is fully justified. A few years after the book was published, new editions of dictionaries added a new meaning to the word 'paradigm'. In dictionaries that order meanings chronologically, the most recent meaning is the last. The 2004 Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary entry for 'paradigm' reads: "1. EXAMPLE, PATTERN; especially: an outstandingly clear or typical example or archetype 2. an example of a conjugation or declension showing a word in all its inflectional forms 3. a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated; broadly: a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind". Editions before 1962 lack the third meaning, which today is applied far more broadly than in the 1962 book. To gauge the differences among these senses, notice that no paradigm (first sense) of a revolution is a revolutionary paradigm (third sense). Every paradigm (first sense) of a revolution is a revolution, a historic event. Every revolutionary paradigm (third sense) is a theoretical framework established through a scientific revolution. No event is a theoretical framework. Kuhn uses the word in the first and third senses, and sometimes it is difficult to tell which he has in mind. He uses it in the first sense to emphasize his view that in stable periods much scientific work imitates patterns established by earlier scientists. The fact that the word 'imitate' has pejorative connotations has not been lost on some scientists who regard Kuhn's book as offensive. He speaks of scientific revolutions as "paradigm shifts", which suggests comparison to figure-ground shifts in cognitive psychology, structure-ambiguity shifts in linguistics, and gestalt shifts it Gestalt psychology. In some cases, such as the Copernican Revolution, which is the subject of Kuhn's previous book, the comparison seems somewhat justified. In others, such as the Thalesian Revolution, the comparison seems absurd. To avoid confusion, one should note that in 'paradigm shift' the word 'paradigm' is being used in the third sense and the "shift" is a kind of collective mental event that takes place more or less contemporaneously in the minds of a sufficiently large or important group of scientists. As Kuhn and others have emphasized, a paradigm shift or more generally the decision by individual scientists to persist in a pre-revolutionary paradigm or to adopt a revolutionary one is often difficult to explain by reference to purely rational thought processes. As a result of the Kuhnian Revolution, philosophy of science became less like branch of epistemology and more like a branch of anthropology.