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After publishing two articles in the Physical Review and one in the Quarterly of Applied Mathematics, in 1951 Kuhn began publishing in Isis. the journal of the history of science edited by George Sarton. In 1957 his first book. The Copernican Revolution. appeared. Following up on the work of Alexandre Koyré and others, this book spelled out in detail the gradual breakdown of attempts to reconcile Aristotelian ways of describing physical processes, and Aristotelian ways of thinking about the methods and function of scientific inquiry, with Copernican astronomy and Galilean mechanics. (See galileo.) It made clear that the traditional account of the New Science as a victory of “reason” over prejudice and superstition was much too simple, and showed why a revolutionary mechanics and a revolutionary astronomy both required the other and a revolution in the philosophers' account of the nature of science, before either could be fully accepted

In his second book. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn made explicit the philosophical moral of this historical story. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a time of ferment in philosophy of science, for writers such as Michael Polanyi, Imre Lakatos, Stephen Toulmin, Paul Feyerabend, and Norwood Russell Hanson had begun to challenge the picture of scientific inquiry which had been sketched by Rudolph Carnap, Karl Popper, Carl Hempel, and others associated with logical positivism (see lakatos: feyerabend: popper: logical empiricism; and logical positivism). This picture had taken for granted the idea of an observation language, neutral between alternative scientific theories, in which the explananda of all such theories might be formulated. The logical positivists had tended to assume that there must be a quasi-algorithimic logic of justification, producing rational choices among alternative theories on the basis of such neutrally formulated data - a logic which could be studied without reference to the history of science. Although Hempel, Goodman, and others had pointed out various difficulties faced by attempts to construct such a logic, most philosophers of science in the 1950s still took the idea of such a logic for granted

Its radical and thoroughgoing repudiation of the idea of such a logic, and of that of a neutral observation language, made The Structure of Scientific Revolutions the most widely read, and most influential, work of philosophy written in English since the Second World War. Dozens of books have been written in response to it. Constantly assigned in undergraduate as well as graduate courses, in almost every academic department, it has altered the self-image of many disciplines, from philosophy through the social sciences to the so-called hard natural sciences. For more than two centuries, up through the heyday of logical positivism, practitioners of many disciplines had wondered if they were being “sufficiently scientific” - a term which they used almost interchangeably with “sufficiently rational” and “sufficiently objective.” The “hard” sciences - physics in particular - were viewed as models which other disciplines should imitate. Kuhn's book suggested that decisions between physical theories are no more algorithmically made than are decisions between alternative political policies. This suggestion was greeted with sighs of relief by some, who felt relieved of their previous methodological worries, and with consternation (and even anger) by others, who interpreted Kuhn as denying science's claim to objective knowledge. (See pragmatic factors in theory acceptance; judgment, role in science; scientific change)

A host of critics gathered to defend science's rationality and objectivity against Kuhn. As defenses of Kuhn against these critics proliferated, new battle lines were drawn which gradually transformed the philosophy of science, and which brought history of science into ever more fruitful interaction with philosophy of science. (See history, role in the philosophy of science.) The resulting controversies interlocked with broader philosophical controversies about the nature of rationality itself, and in particular with the debate between the atomistic accounts of language and thought familiar from the tradition of British Empiricism and more holistic accounts offered by Quine (see quine), the later Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, and Putnam. Kuhn's work thus became central to the development of post-positivistic analytic philosophy. Reactions to his book produced an enormous increase in the amount and sophistication of philosophical discussion of meaning change, and of the distinction (if any) between observational and theoretical terms. (See observation and theory and theoretical terms)

Much discussion of Kuhn's work has focused on the question of whether either tables or electrons can be said to exist independently of human thought. Even though Kuhn for many years explicitly characterized himself as a realist, he was often accused of lacking a sufficiently robust sense of mind-independent reality, and of lending aid and comfort to anti-realism: the view that there is no fact of the matter about which of two scientific theories is true (see underdetermination). He also insisted that he had no intention of breaking down the distinction between science and nonscience, but merely wished to demythologize scientific practice by setting aside a simplistic picture of scientific practice as the patient accumulation of “hard facts.” He clarified his position considerably in a postscript to the second edition of Structure and also in various further explanations and replies to criticisms (collected in Kuhn 1977)

Kuhn turned away from philosophy to history for a time, while preparing a history of the origins of quantum mechanics (Kuhn 1978). But since the publication of that book the bulk of his work consisted in detailed defenses of the claim that there is no language-independent reality, no single “Way The World Is” (a claim first defended, in those terms, by Nelson Goodman) (see natural kinds). He subsequently said: “I aim to deny all meaning to claims that successive scientific beliefs become more and more probable or better and better approximations to the truth and simultaneously to suggest that the subject of truth claims cannot be a relation between beliefs and a putatively mind-independent or ‘external’ world” (Kuhn 1993, p. 330)

Kuhn then defended his much-discussed thesis that Aristotle lived in a different world from Galileo (Kuhn 1962, ch. 10) by an analogy between the evolution of scientific ideas and that of biological species: “Like a practice and its world, a species and its niche are interdefined; neither component of either pair can be known without the other” (Kuhn 1993, p. 337). On this view, you can no more identify the world to which a statement or a theory corresponds, or which it accurately represents, without a knowledge of the language in which the statement or theory is framed, than you can identify a biological niche without knowledge of the behavior of the species which inhabits, or inhabited, that niche

Kuhn's critics continued to press on the question of whether this line of thought can be reconciled with his claim that science produces genuine knowledge of nature. These critics insist that, if we drop the notion of a language-neutral reality to be accurately represented, we endanger the distinction between increasing knowledge of nature and mere pragmatic adjustments in response to novel stimuli. Kuhn's response consisted in denying that the “objective of scientific research” is accuracy of representation. Rather, “whether or not individual practitioners are aware of it, they are trained to and rewarded for solving intricate puzzles - be they instrumental, theoretical, logical or mathematical - at the interface between their phenomenal world and their community's beliefs about it” (ibid., p. 338). The principal question raised, though not yet resolved, by Kuhn's work is: Can the link between representation and knowledge, a link still taken for granted by most post-empiricist analytic philosophers, be broken without abandoning the distinction between rational and irrational human practices? Kuhn clearly thought that it could. He ended a response to his critics with the sentence: “Those who proclaim that no interest-driven practice can properly be identified as the rational pursuit of knowledge make a profound and consequential mistake” (ibid, p. 339)

References and further reading

Works by Kuhn

Works by the authors