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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Holmes, Porter and Hacking on the Experimental Turn

Frederic L. Holmes (1932-2003)

In my previous post I discussed Jonathan Rée's view that many late-twentieth century intellectuals over-reacted to the excesses of their modernist predecessors. In this post I suggest that something similar may have happened with respect to experiment in the history of science. It is said that past historians studied the ideas of science rather than its materials, its software rather than its hardware. But these claims are overblown, and partly because their authors take a small number of recent idealists as representative of the discipline. I want to flesh out these assertions by looking at a book by the philosopher Ian Hacking and at papers by the historians Frederic Holmes and Roy Porter.

I'll start with Holmes, since he says with authority just about everything I want to say. My source is his “Do We Understand Historically How Experimental Knowledge Is Acquired?” History of Science, vol. 30 (1992), 119-136.

Holmes' speciality was experiment, a topic that is central to the “material culture” of science as historians now understand that label. Holmes begins with a roll-call of authors who have proclaimed the novelty of recent studies of experimental practice. Here is a selection of claims, their authors, and the dates on which they were made:

“Despite the slogan that science advances through experiments, virtually the entire literature of the history of science concerns theory” (Peter Galison, 1987)

“Experiment is a respected but neglected activity ... the process of experimentation is taken to be either unproblematic or uninteresting” (David Gooding, Trevor Pinch and Simon Schaffer, 1989)

“...little attention has been directed at how experiments are actually done, and how they come to be regarded as meaningful” (Jan Golinski, 1990)

Holmes then gives a list of counter-examples to these generalisations. For example, Henry Guerlac declared in 1959 that it was “fallacious to make an arbitrary distinction between ideas and experience, between thought and action, and to treat ideas as if they had a totally independent life of their own, divorced from material reality.”

Other historians practised what Guerlac preached. I. Bernard Cohen published a book in 1956 called Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry Into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin's Work in Electricity as an Examble Thereof. Soon afterwards, Guerlac himself wrote a book called Lavoisier--the Crucial Year: The Background and Origin of his First Experiments on Combustion in 1772. The authors of both books made a point of focusing on experiments as much as, or more than, theoretical speculation.

The next generation, partly inspired by Guerlac and Cohen, went one step further by studying the drafts and lab notes of past scientists rather than their published articles. Others studied long-term changes in scientific domains, with an emphasis on instruments and institutions. Holmes discusses the following books, all published before the three quotes at the beginning of this post:

L. Pearce Williams, Michael Faraday (1966)
Mirko Grmek, Raisonnement expérimental et recherches toxicologiques chez Claude Bernard (1973)
Holmes, Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry (1974)
Gerald Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology (1978)
John Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries (1979) [1]
Robert Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists (1980) [1]
John Lesch, Science and Medicine in France (1984)
A number of articles picked more or less at random from the journal Isis between 1957 and 1966.

Holmes could have gone on. He could have discussed books by Mauric Daumas on the cabinets de physique of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or those by William Middleton on the histories of the thermometer and barometer. Nor should we forget the Harvard Case Studies in Experimental Science, which whatever their flaws certainly contain descriptions of experiments. There is also Stillman Drake's work on Galileo's experimental apparatus, Alistair Crombie's Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100-1700, and Holmes' own Lavoisier and the Chemistry of Life: an Exploration of Scientific Creativity—all of which predate the three quotes at the start of this post. Many more examples can be found under “Scientific Instruments and Special Techniques” in the Isis Critical Bibliographies from 1955 onwards.

But that's not all. If Heilbron's Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries counts as a study of experiment rather than theory, then so do a large proportion of the histories of science written before 1900. Take the first book-length history of electricity, Joseph's Priestley's History and Present State of Electricity, the first edition of which appeared in 1767. The contents page of the third edition can be viewed here, and anyone who glances at it will note that for each figure in his history Priestley promises to describe their “experiments and discoveries.” And indeed, in the body of the book he describes both.

As a work of history, Heilbron's book is greatly superior to Priestley's. But the difference between them is certainly not that Priestley focuses on theory whereas Heilbron focuses on experiment. Granted, Heilbron goes into more detail than Priestley for each major eighteenth-century electrical experiment; but Heilbron also goes into more detail than Priestley for each major theory of that period.

Heilbron himself has written that the “experimental turn” is overrated. Here is the first paragraph of his review of two books from 1989, The Uses of Experiment and The Development of the Laboratory [2].

During the last few years, a few historians and sociologists of science have made the discovery that experiment and measurement are important and problematic parts of the scientific enterprise. The dazzle of this illumination carried conviction of its novelty; and the editors of The uses of experiment open their preface with the astonishing claim that “experiment is a respected but neglected activity.” A few lines later they specify not experiment, but “the process of experimentation" as the neglected subject, only to return immediately to their gambit: “the neglect of experiment is symptomatic of a prejudice against practical activity in favour of speech acts.” Being editors, however, they are condemned to commit speech acts. These include calling attention to rhetorical devices by which scientists put forward arguments based on experiments and emphasising the logical and epistemological difficulties of confirmation and corroboration of results of experiments and instrumental tests. These themes are important; they receive incisive treatment; but they do not have the freshness advertised.

***

Holmes suggests in passing two explanations for the false advertising that Heilbron describes. One is that the self-proclaimed innovators are studying new aspects of experiment rather than newly studying experiment itself. This becomes apparent in the second part of Holmes' article where he contrasts his own approach to experiment with the “newer” approach as represented by that of Leviathan and the Air Pump, a book that many subsequent historians of experiment have taken as a guide. Holmes draws the contrast with respect to Robert Boyle, the man whose air pump features in the title of the book in question:

Shapin and Schaffer portray an assertive Boyle, mobilizing literary resources to secure assent for matters of fact he has produced through a material technology [ie. the air pump]. I portray a playful, exploratory Boyle, performing experiments that seek answers to questions he poses, often tentative and uncertain... (133)

In other words, the new historians of experiment focus on how experimental knowledge is disseminated rather than how it is acquired. Holmes is interested in the latter, as per the title of the paper under discussion.

Holmes seems to say that the former approach is genuinely new, and he rightly admires Schaffer and Shapin's book. But he denies that it represents an increased emphasis on experiment. At most it is an increased emphasis on a particular aspect of experiment, an emphasis that complements traditional accounts but in no way replaces them. The new approach has its own dangers, he says, such as focusing on a small sample of a scientist's experiments and thereby tearing them from “a rich tapestry of intermingled experimentation and reasoning” (126).

Another of Holmes' suggestions is that often it seems to be philosophers rather than historians who are accused of neglecting experiment. At the same time, Holmes would not have written the article if he did not think that historians were among the targets of the accusation. Two possibilities arise, although Holmes does not discuss them in this particular article. One is that philosophers really have neglected experiment, but that the so-called innovators have unjustly tarred past historians with the idealistic brush. Another possibility is that the new historians of experiment are writing a kind of meta-history of experiment: one which considers experiment at a more abstract level than historians usually do, and therefore has new things to say about experiment even though it differs little from traditional accounts at the level of basic description.

***

There are grains of truth in all of these suggestions. But another explanation, and perhaps a more far-reaching one, is that much of the talk about a neglect of experiment is directed at a small but influential group of recent historians and philosophers of science. This group can indeed be said to have neglected experiment (although they should also be credited with showing just how much experiment depends on theory). The claim that experiment is a new topic—whether that claim is made in 1983 or 2013—is often an error based on an unwarranted extrapolation from this group of recent idealists to all historians and philosophers of science who preceded them.

A glance at two pieces, one by a historian and one by a philosopher, can help to substantiate this thesis.

The first is an influential chapter by Roy Porter, a wonderful and much-mourned historian of medicine, Britain, and the eighteenth century. His “The Scientific Revolution: A Spoke in the Wheel?” appeared in 1986 in Porter and Teich, eds., Revolution in History (CUP). The title of the chapter says that it is about the idea of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century, but it is also about how that idea shaped the discipline of the history of science between about 1940 and 1970. The Scientific Revolution, Porter writes, was

...initially the brain-child and shibboleth of a specific cluster of scholars emerging during the 1940s, including the Russian émigré Alexandre Koyré, [the Cambridge historian Herbert] Butterfield, whose outline history popularized Koyré's work, Rupert Hall, who was Butterfield's pupil, and, a little later, Marie Boas [Hall]. Their scrupulous scholarship and prolific works of synthesis animated an emerging discipline, and laid down a coherent framework for future research (295).

For these historians, science was essentially thought – profound, bold, logical, abstract...Thus idealism has been pervasive, and its implications run even to the interpretation of detailed episodes [such as Alexander Koyré's claim that Galileo didn't perform many of the experiments he described] (296).

The first passage answers the “who” question clearly enough, and the second gives an idea of what sort of “idealism” they had in common. It is precisely the kind of idealism that could justly be accused of neglecting experiment, as the example of Koyré suggests. Granted, Porter's article does not make any bold claims for a turn towards experiment; and he explicitly acknowledges that the idealism of Koyré and his English counterparts was a recent and local phenomenon. But by focusing on those idealists and saying little about their predecessors he sets them up as the chief foil to revisionist accounts of the Scientific Revolution, and by extension to revisionist histories of science in general.

Compare Porter's targets with those in an influential book in philosophy, Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Science (CUP, 1983). A fair summary of the book is that “representing” is a problematic activity that philosophers have written too much about, and that “intervening” is a promising activity that they have written too little about.

Hacking makes some bold claims at the beginning of his discussion of “intervening”:

History of the natural sciences is almost always written as a history of theory. Philosophy of science has so much become philosophy of theory that the very existence of pre-theoretical observations or experiments has been denied. I hope the following chapters might initiate a Back-to-Bacon movement, in which we attend more seriously to experimental science. Experimentation has a life of its own.

This is one of the most cited passages—by historians and sociologists as well as by philosophers—in the “new” literature on experimentation. For example, the first two sentences are quoted near the beginning of Leviathan and the Air Pump to show that “even philosophers are beginning to admit the anti-practice and pro-theory prejudices of their discipline” (17). Having read a fair chunk of the recent literature on experimentation, I am confident that a citation analysis would reveal many more examples.

However on reading Hacking's ideas about “intervening” it becomes clear that his main targets are not philosophers of science per se but Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Imré Lakatos. He criticises Popper for thinking that observations are usually made to confirm or refute pre-conceived hypothesis (155); he criticises Kuhn for preferring a theoretician over an experimenter in a book that Kuhn was editing (151-152); he criticises Feyerabend for saying that all observation is theory-laden (173); and he criticises Lakatos for implying that there is no such thing as a crucial experiment (254-261).

Hacking's chief conclusion—that there is such a thing as “pre-theoretical observations or experiments”—is novel with respect to this sequence of recent idealists. But with respect to many earlier philosophers of science, from Robert Boyle to John Stuart Mill, it is a statement of the obvious. Encouraged by Hacking's polemical passages, like the one quoted above, historians and sociologists of science have supposed that his chief conclusion is a piece of earthquake-like novelty that will totally reform the way we do the history and sociology of science. There are some new ideas in Hacking's book, but fewer than is often supposed (and insofar as they are new they are controversial, such as the idea that active experiment furnishes powerful arguments for scientific realism that passive observation does not) [3].

The broader lesson of this post is that historians should be clear about who they are accusing of what. The three quotes at the beginning of this post make claims about a large number of past historians of science. But the books and articles in which those quotes appear do not attempt anything like a systematic survey of the books and articles that they indict. The closest approximations that I have seen of such a survey are by those who reject the indictment, like Holmes, Heilbron, and Brian Baigrie [4]. Among those who make the indictment, the one who supplies the most evidence seems to be a philosopher (Hacking, in Representing and Intervening) rather than any historian. If politeness is the reason for this reticence, it is laudable but misguided: better to be openly critical than to confuse the issue with unsupported insinuations.


[1] To be fair, these two books are sometimes acknowledged as precursors of the experimental turn (eg. Leviathan and the Air Pump, 15).

[2] Medical History, vol. 34, no. 3 (1990), 335 (paywall).

[3] This last point generalises. I am not claiming that there is nothing new about the experimental turn, just that the novelty has been exaggerated and poorly defined and that claims to novelty have not been backed up with much historiographical evidence.

[4] Baigrie, “Scientific Practice: The View From the Tabletop,” in Jed Buchwald, ed., Theories and Stories of Doing Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), chap. 5. Expand post.

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