Was Kuhn an internalist?

Thomas Kuhn

50th anniversary celebrations are in full swing, and my internalist manifesto is on the table. So it seems like a good time to look at Thomas Kuhn's attitude to internalism in the history of science. The standard view, I take it, is that Kuhn was a pretty uncompromising internalist who was much more interested in the dynamics of specialist communities than he was in the larger political or social scene. This view gets some support from the book being celebrated this year, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). But some of his other writings paint a different picture.

The standard view has at least four points in its favour. One is that Structure says little or nothing political or social events outside science. The book may have paved the way for thorough-going externalist treatments of scientific episodes. But it did so indirectly, by suggesting that reason and data were usually not enough to decide between competing paradigms.

Another is that the book is impressionistic even when it considers the social structure of scientific communities. Take pedagogy, for example. In principle, scientific training plays a crucial role in Kuhn's account of normal science. But in practice, his case studies of the Newtonian physics or Lavoisier's chemistry say little about the role of particular textbooks, teachers, or training regimes in sustaining those paradigms.

A third point is that Kuhn's version of normal science—especially the absence of any explicit rules by which outsiders might grasp a paradigm—is just what you would expect if Kuhn wanted to discourage state intervention in science. If outsiders can't understand a specialist community, they have no business trying to manage its affairs.

The final and culminating point is that all this places Kuhn rather neatly in the context of Cold War debates about science policy. Between 1947 and 1956 Kuhn was involved in a history of science course designed by James Bryant Conant, then president of Harvard, Kuhn's alma mater. During the same period Conant was one of a number of scientists and science administrators calling for a National Science Foundation to fund basic science. The history of science course that Kuhn taught was the pedagogical wing of Conant's campaign for no-strings government funding for science. [1]

To these four points one can add Kuhn's notorious distaste for the way Structure was taken up by social constructivists. Perhaps this distaste was linked to the relentless technicality of his 1978 book, Black-Body Radiation and the Quantum Discontinuity. This book was so internalist that John Heilbron compared its author to the physicist who “isolates the system under study from the rest of nature and strips it down to a few analyzable properties” [2].

***

These are good points, but there are also counter-points. Four of the latter can be found in Kuhn's “The Relations Between History and History of Science,” a paper published in 1971 [3].

This paper shows, firstly, that Kuhn was troubled by the internal/external divide. For historians of science, he wrote, their relationship with mainstream history was “the central dilemma of their field” (271). The whole point of the article is to explain why there is so little fruitful interaction between general historians and historians of science, and to speculate on how this problem might be solved.

Secondly, Kuhn criticises historians of science who write with internalist blinkers. For example, he writes that the history written by practising scientists has “two great limitations,” one of which is that it “produced exclusively internal histories which considered neither context for, not external effects of, the evolution of the concepts and techniques being discussed” (289).

Later on in the article Kuhn criticises a newer strand of historiography for being “internal history in the sense that it pays little or no attention to the institutional or socio-economic context within which the sciences have developed” (291). He even puts the boot into Alexandre Koyré for having “little but scorn for the Merton thesis or the relation between science and technology, industry, or the crafts” (291).

Thirdly, the paper reminds us that Kuhn practised what he preached in two of his most influential works on the history of science. At one point he mentions his 1957 book The Copernican Revolution, noting with pride that “when it was written the book was the only one that attempted to portray, within a single pair of covers, both the technical-astronomical and the wider intellectual-historical dimensions of the [Copernican] revolution” (297).

The other reminder concerns an article that would not appear until 1976, but which Kuhn summarised as follows in “The Relations Between History and History of Science.” The summary is long but rewarding:

During the nineteenth century the institutional and social structure of the sciences was transformed in ways not even foreshadowed in the Scientific Revolution. Beginning in the 1780's and continuing through the first half of the following century, newly formed societies of specialists in individual branches of science assumed the leadership which the all-embracing national societies had previously attempted to supply.

Simultaneously, private scientific journals and particularly journals of individual specialties proliferated rapidly and increasingly replaced the house organs of the national academies which had previously been the almost exclusive media of public scientific communication.

A similar change is visible in scientific education and in the locus of research. Excepting in medicine and at a few military schools, scientific education scarcely existed before the foundation of the Ecole polytechnique in the last decade of the eighteenth century...

These are the developments which first made possible and then supported what had previously scarcely existed, the professional scientific career...It is time [these developments] found [their] way into history books, but [they are] too much a part of other developments in the nineteenth century to be untangled by historians of science alone (287-288).

This is fine summary of the technical, social and institutional developments that Kuhn called the “Second Scientific Revolution” and that he detailed in his “Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Modern Physical Sciences” [4].

The same article 1976 includes a thesis about the relationship between science and religion that is even more explicit in its externalist interests. This is Kuhn's conjecture that the ancient mathematical sciences (such as optics and astronomy) flourished mainly in Catholic contexts whereas the new experimental sciences (such as heat and electricity) flourished mainly in Protestant contexts. Historians will recognise this as an extension of a thesis advanced by the sociologist Robert Merton.

The final antidote to the view that Kuhn was a hard-core internalist is that he has nice things to say about a new crowd of young externalists. These historians of science are, he says...

...turning more and more to the study of what is often described as external history. Increasingly they emphasize the effects on science not of the intellectual but of the socioeconomic milieu, effects manifest in changing patterns of education, institutionalization, communication, and values. Their efforts owe some thing to the older Marxist histories, but their concerns are at once broader, deeper, and less doctrinaire than those of their predecessors (299).

These new-comers should be welcomed, Kuhn writes, because the sciences “provide a particularly promising area in which to explore the role of forces current in the larger society in shaping the evolution of a discipline which is simultaneously controlled by its own internal demands” (299-300).

Skeptics will detect an internalist echo in this last quote. And indeed, Kuhn insists throughout this article that historians pay attention to the “internal demands” of specialised disciplines. Even as he writes about the relations between “science” and “technology" he urges that we treat them as two distinct entities. And he has no patience for externalist historians of science who ignore the technical details of the science they purport to explain.

Nevertheless, Kuhn's stance in “The Relations between History and the History of Science” is a far cry from the narrow internalism that one finds in Structure and Black-Body Radiation. In the article he takes very seriously the project of uniting technical history of science with broader social and intellectual history, and he reminds us of his own attempts to bridge the gap.


Postscript. Where does this leave my claim in the previous post that there is nothing wrong with internal history of science? Isn't Kuhn arguing for the kind of “hybrid” history of science whose primacy I questioned in that post?

To a large extent Kuhn is arguing for that view, and insofar as he is doing so then I have to bite the bullet and say that he's wrong. He seems to not only argue for the importance of hybrid history of science, but also to place it on a higher rung than internal history—and that's exactly what I object to.

However there are two important caveats. One is that Kuhn was writing at time when there really was a gap to bridge. As he says in the article, the best general historians of the time had a poor understanding of the technical content of science, and the best historians of science had little interest in anything else. Since Kuhn's article we have spent forty years bridging the gap, and now that we have done so we can remove hybridisation from the top of the discipline's agenda.

The other caveat is that in practice Kuhn did not require that all works in the history of science try integrate science and society. In some of his works he did just that; in others, such as Structure and Black-Body Radiation, he had other fish to fry. So in practice he was an advocate of variety rather than a slave to hybridity. And that's precisely the stance I was arguing for in my previous post.



[1] The best account of these four points, and one that I recommend, is Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2012), chap. 6. Related points are made in Stephen Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History of Our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

[2] “Thomas Samuel Kuhn, 18 July 1922-17 June 1996.” Isis 89, no. 3 (1998): 505–515, at 511-512.

[3] Daedelus 100, no. 2 (1971): 271–304.

[4] Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7, no. 1 (1976): 1-31. Expand post.

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