rupert read - kuhn vs popper

8/11/2019 Rupert Read - Kuhn vs Popper

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10.1177/0048393105279925PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / September 2005Read / WRITING ON ALEGENDARY PHILOSOPHER

How and How Not to Write on aLegendary Philosopher

RUPERT READUniversity of East Anglia

Steve Fuller,Kuhn vs. Popper: The struggle for the soul of science. Cam-bridge: Icon, 2003. Pp. iv + 227. $24.50 (hardcover).

Thomas Nickles, ed.,Thomas Kuhn. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 298. $27.99 (paper).

Theauthor arguesthatFullers book,with thesingle exceptionof itscorrect rein-terpretation of Kuhn asno apostle of postmodernismsuch that his fansandfoes alike are boxing with (or cheering on) only a shadow Kuhnis worsethan worthless. For, in a disreputable and outright propagandistic fashion, itconsists in a series of serious distortions of and outright falsehoods about Kuhnand recent philosophy of science, distortions and falsehoods which may wellmislead the unwary reader. Nickless collection by contrast is a competent, use-ful, andworkmanlikeperformance,althoughthe authorargues that theeditorsfocus on cognitive science uses of Kuhn (and of Wittgenstein) is unhelpful, inthat these uses again distort the philosophy of Kuhn (as of Wittgenstein), whowas on balance no apostle of cognitive science either.

Keywords: Kuhn; Fuller; Nickles; scientific revolution

There has been a gradually growingand very welcomeresurgence ofinterest in Kuhns philosophy of the sciences since his death in 1996. The two

books under review are (though ultimately in very differentways) symptomsof this resurgence. One is in a major Cambridge series on contemporary phi-losophy; theother is in a large print runwitha popularpress. I shall discussFullers popular book first, and then discuss the contrasting more aca-demic approach taken by Nickles et al.

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Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 35 No. 3, September 2005 1-19DOI: 10.1177/0048393105279925

2005 Sage Publications


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FULLERS POPPER VERSUS FULLERS KUHN

Let me start by accentuating the positive. Following Hollinger,Fuller emphasizes, quite correctly, that the widespread images ofKuhn and Popper beyond and even within their professions are fun-damentally misleading. Kuhn is widely taken to advocate method-ological and conceptual relativism, Popper to be a narrow-mindedideologue of scientific method. In reality, Kuhn had no truck withmethodological relativism, and his conceptual relativism, if such itbe, is extremely circumscribed and circumspect; while Popper wasnotan enemy of scientificrevolutionbutan advocateofcontinuous sci-entific revolution. As Fuller puts it, seemingly borrowing (without

attribution) from my own book,Kuhn(Polity, 2002), Popper in effecttries to outflank Kuhn on the Left, not on the Right. If the middleground were the Russian Revolution, thenPopper would be closer toTrotsky than to the White counterrevolutionaries . . . while Kuhn, farfrom being an advocate of introducing new paradigms two-a-penny, in factdefinesscience by itsrefusalto do so.

This point is of fundamental importance, for it follows directly thatKuhn and (to only a slightly lesser extent) Popper have been funda-mentallymisunderstood. Kuhn is no apostle of postmodernism, andhis fans and foes alike are boxing with (or cheering on) a shadowKuhn, a legendary and not a real figure from the history of ideas,when they write or speak otherwise.

Unfortunately, the point that I have brought out above is the only

thing of any worth in Fullers book. As I shall explain, the book as awhole fails to follow through on thisgenuineinsight. It mainlydelivers extremely loosely connected insinuations, spins, and(sometimes) plain falsehoods. It offers in most respects a deeply mis-leading picture of 20th-century philosophy of science.

I did not havetoreadfar intothis bookin orderto concludethatit isworthless.I willfocusprimarily onFullers short introduction.(Thereremains a problem: this being an Icon book, intended forpopularcon-sumption, some potential readers will be not evenvaguelyinformedabout its subject. Fuller perhaps relies on thisif so, his work here iseven more reprehensible.)1

Let us start, then, at the start: The easiest way to start a discussionabout science with people from varied backgrounds is by mentioning

Kuhn. Usually theresponse is positive, even enthusiastic,exceptfromthose who still want to uphold falsifiability as sciences gold stan-dard (p. 1). This is simply false. If you want to start a discussion

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about (philosophy of) science with people truly from varied back-grounds, you will find that most of them have never heard Kuhnsname, so mentioning it will do you little good. Most people whohaveheard of Kuhn have also heard of other philosophies of science,such as Lakatoss, or at least of Positivism, or perhaps of some recentRealist philosophy of science; or alternatively of Continental fig-ures in the field such as perhaps Husserl, Canguilhem, FoucaultorDuhem.Andmany more people have heardof Planck, Heisenberg, orEinstein as philosophers of science thanhave heard of Kuhn. Or, if weare talking about more or less contemporary figures, Gould,Dawkins, or Chomsky are better known as philosophers of sciencethan Kuhn is. And certainly Popper is better known than Kuhn. When

graduate students come to start work in philosophy or the social sci-ences at my ownuniversity, University of EastAnglia, there aresomewho havenot evenheard ofKuhn, but theyhaveall heard ofPopper.

Butthereis a more significant distortionlurking here. By givingtheimpressionthat there is a generally favorable view of Kuhn out there,except among noble but beleaguered Popperians, Fuller hides theundeniable fact that not only do most philosophers and theorists ofscience (regrettably, in my view) think that the debate has moved onfrom the (allegedly) stale confrontation of Kuhn with Popper, butalso, morecrucially, many still have a fairlyunremitting hostilityto Kuhn.To read the openingand the wholeof Fullers book, one wouldhave the impression that Kuhn is in the ascendancy everywhere. Infact, in the places that Kuhn cared aboutphilosophy and history of

science circles, and in science-apologeticshis reputation is mostlypoor.

It would be convenient for Fuller if the storyand that is all that itisthat he tells about Kuhns ascendancy were true. For it would pithim as a righteous underdog: it would cast Fuller as, in the peculiarphrase of his chapter 9, a Tory valiantly battling the ascendant Whigsof Kuhnianism (let the point pass for now that Fullers attempt topaintKuhn asa kind ofWhighistorian is perhaps one of the most mis-leading suggestions of his [misleading] book).

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1. Steve Fuller, The Case of Fuller against Kuhn, Social Epistemology18, no. 1(2004): 3-49, is more professional/academic in style than the book under review. Butinmyopinion,ittooislittlemorethanapieceofpropaganda,inwhichFullergoesasfaras

he can within the constraints of the libel laws to denigrate his various opponents(including, of course, Kuhn andalso myself) without in some keycasesproviding eventhe slightest scintilla of evidence for these denigrations.


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Ofcourse,akeyreasonforallthisisagaintheonegoodpointFullermakes in the whole book. The fact is that most of Kuhns friends,followers, or supporters areworthless to him. They turn himintoa postmodern relativistexactly the figure who his enemies inmuch of the intellectual world, especially the philosophers of andapologists forscience, take himto be, too. Most famousscientists whowrite about sciencefornon-scientistsleading examplesinclude Ste-venWeinberg andAlanSokalarevery critical of Kuhn. Fullerknowsthis; for, as I say, it structures his work. He rightly exposes the merelegendariness of the image of Kuhn that grips most people who haveheard of Kuhn. This begs thefollowing important question: whydoesFuller not let his audience know that in philosophy and science there

is frequently still intensehostilitytoorsheer lack of interest inKuhn?

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To sum up, so far: it is false to claim that the response to a mentionof Kuhn is usually positive or enthusiastic. It is, rather, usually either(close to) zero, or hostile. The main exception is in fields such as liter-arystudies, fieldsdistantfrom those whichKuhn wrotein andon,butfields which are, perhaps not coincidentally, closer to the fields thatFuller has made his own. (Fuller teaches in a sociology department.Even in some such soft fields, such as politics, however, Popper isstill far more widely taughtthan Kuhn. Fuller dangerously overplaysthe extent to which Kuhn is actually intellectually present in anymeaningful way in the training of most graduate students in mostacademic fields.) When the response to Kuhn is hostile, this is (by theway) more likely to be due to (what I would call) Scientism, la

Weinberg for instance, than it is specifically due to an advocacy ofPopperianism.

When the response is positive/enthusiastic, it is usually foundedon ignorance. Enthusiasm for what Kuhn actually thought is, regret-tably in my view, a rare phenomenon.3

Fuller needs to present Kuhn as a genuinely and massively influ-ential philosopher of science whose views are dogmatically adheredto,forthepointofhisbooktobeashesaysitisandforthebooktobeofthe moment that he claims it is. But Fuller, unfortunately, knows thatKuhn is misunderstood more often than not,andknows that Kuhn isvery, very far from universally admired, even where he is known.Fuller is familiar enough with the philosophical literatureto know all


2. I shall try in effect to answer this question, below.3.In fairness, oneshouldagain be clear here that this is,sadly, almostequally true of

Popper.


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about Scheffler, Haack, Shapere, and so on, who took themselves tooppose Kuhn and helped to solidify the image of him as a relativistand an irrationalist. The excuse is not available to Fuller that might beavailable to some writers in (e.g.) literary studies or feminist theorytalking about Kuhn: lack of awareness of the Analytic philosophicalliterature, and of the many contexts in which Popper is far betterknownthan Kuhn.Fullerhas, in fact, no excusefor hishighlymislead-ing presentation of Kuhns historical placing and reception.

Moving onto page 2 (!): here it is worth remarking that, in thecourseof beginning to informhisreaders, usefully, about themislead-ing popular images of Kuhn and Popper, Fuller manages rapidly toinsert his own misleading impressions. For instance, he writes that

Popper is remembered as a grumpy autocrat, so far as his philoso-phy of science is concerned. It is true that that version of Popper ismisleading;butvirtually nowhere in this bookdoes Fuller come closeto acknowledging the reasonablereasonfor this misleading image(principally, that Popper wassomething of a would-be autocrat so faras hispolicing of theboundariesof science wasconcerned).4 Poppersimportant remarks about the social and psychological sciences,which in large part he condemned as unscientific,5 are just aboutentirely ignored by Fuller. Now, my own view, rather like Kuhns(and, still more so, Winchs), is that there are indeed some good rea-sons forwithholding theterm sciencefrom theso-calledhumansci-ences, including the social sciences. Indeed, as even Fuller occa-sionally allows himself to note, far from being a relativistic

philosophy, Kuhns philosophy of science is foundedon noting themassive difference between subjects such as sociology, where every-


4.Fuller loves to regalehis readerwithstories from Kuhnslifethat (allegedly)showKuhn in a sad or bad or politically problematic light. In passing, then: why does he notsee fit to mention Poppers real-life autocratic leanings, such as his cutting off of all hisleading graduate students? Take for instance Joseph Agassi: arguably, Popper cut himoff, notbecauseAgassi criticizedhim butbecausehe felt that Agassihadnot been vigor-ous enough in his defence of him in a review! (For more details of a story which is ofcourse farmore subtle than I cando justiceto in this footnote, see Joseph Agassi,A Phi-losophers Apprentice: In Karl Poppers Workshop [Amsterdam and Atlanta: WorkshopRodopi, 1993].)

5.To be precise: Popperattacked some socialscience asmetaphysics pretendingnotto be metaphysics, forexample he attacked Marxists andFreudians because theymadepropositions untestable. He commended Marx for being scientific for advancing arefutablehypothesisaboutthe occurrenceof a revolution. He also made some interest-ingand in many ways reasonable/apposite remarks on theproper methodology of thesocial sciences in terms of rational reconstruction of courses of action.


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thing is constantly being torn up to start all over again, and subjectssuch as chemistry, which exhibit progress.6 But I for one have signifi-cant reservations about the manner and nature of Poppers criticismsof Marx, Freud, and so on (and about his seeming lack of understand-ingof thehermeneutic aspectof social science). And,moresignif-icantly still perhaps forthis reviewessay, shouldnotFullerhave somesuch reservations?And will notmany of hisreaders? Indeed,perhapsthey wouldif Fuller had risked mentioning this stance of Poppersto them.

Obviously there is insufficient room in this review essay for anevaluation of Poppers own philosophy of science. Suffice to say thatFullers understanding of Popper is no lessshallow than his read-

ing of Kuhn. A careful examination of Poppers philosophyandinparticular of his policing the borders of science, his criticisms of psy-choanalysis, and so onwould, I believe, provide at least some goodgrounds for a judgment of autocracy. Even if Fuller is right in say-ing that this judgment could not finally survive scrutiny, he certainlydoes not undertake the analysis which would support this view. Hismannerof presentingtheclaim that Popperwasnotautocraticas anobvious, glaring fact that only a malevolent fool would missironically does Popper a disservice.

A somewhat similar momentof misinformationoccurson pages 5-6, where we encounter the following remarkable sentence:

For those who have inherited Kuhns Cold War belief that normal sci-

ence is a bulwark in a volatileworld,it comes as no surprise that philos-ophers today sooner criticise Creationists for violating evolutionarystrictures than evolutionists for violating more general scientificnormsan activity for which Popper had been notorious.

I did a double-take when I first read this remark. Could Fuller reallybe saying that it is more important to question whether evolution isreally science than it is to question whether Creationism is? Astonish-ingly, it appears that the answer to this question is Yes. At a timewhen evolutionary theory is the only game in town, and yet is disbe-lieved by more than 100 million Americans, who in states like Kansasare again (as I write, in early 2005) on the march to remove Darwinfrom the school curriculum, and whose scientific ignorance is nowknown even to be a drag on their economy, this is a highly bizarre


6. See Thomas Kuhn, Preface, inThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions(Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1970); henceforth SSR.


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stance for a public intellectual to take. (One does not have to be aDawkins-esque polemicist about evolution to make any of thesepoints against Fuller; one has only to be someone with some basicunderstanding of and respect for the discipline of biology.) We areresponsible for the consequences of what we writeI am drawingattention to an implication and thus a possible consequence ofFullers remark here that is in my view genuinely shocking.

Furthermore, Fuller fails to mention that Popper in later yearsthankfullygave uphis challenge to evolutionary theory as (allegedly)metaphysical and therefore unscientific.7 Again, in a book intendedfor a lay public, Fullers failure to report this is reprehensible. Eitherhe is deliberately misleading his audience, or else he is simply too ill-

informed/incompetentto bewritinga book onthetopic ofPopper andKuhn.8

Lower on the same page, as the introduction approaches its end,Fuller returns to his opening theme, of Kuhns alleged ascendancy:

[T]he outcome of [Poppers] debate with Kuhn really mattered. Withthedefeat of Popper(and his followers), thenormativestructureof sci-ence drastically changed. Whereas actual scientific communitiesexisted forPopper only as more or lesscorrupt versions of thescientificideal, forKuhn thescientific ideal is whatever hashistoricallyemergedas the dominant scientific communities.In the wake ofKuhns victory,


7. To be precise, it is important to be clear that using a term such as unscientific

(according to the/Poppers criterion of demarcation) did not in any case necessarilyinvolve an underestimation of Darwins theory. According to Popper, it was to beviewedas a metaphysical theorya theorythat, alongwith otherunfalsifiablehypoth-eses (suchas purely existentialones, or indeed fundamental scientific principles), mayaddto theempirical overallcontent ofour views,providingscientistswith newwaysofconceiving the world and new methods to explore it with. Metaphysical or meta-physics, according to Popper and his followers, do not necessarily bear any negativevalue.Indeed, in his later years, Popper developed his views of the progress of knowl-edge within an evolutionary framework (evolutionary epistemology)as, intrigu-ingly, did Kuhn. (Has the difference between Kuhn and Popper been exaggerated?While accentuating the differences between them [clearly!] is important, it is alsoimportantto understand theoftenunderestimatedwaysin which theywerenot in real-ity versus each other at all. On this point, Fullers book is of zero [or, rather, negative]utility; see Wes Sharrock andRupert Read, Kuhn andthe Methodologists of Science,in Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read,Kuhn[Oxford: Polity, 2002], ch. 4, for an account

which is I think of use.)8. If Fuller wanted an illustrious ally for such a stance vis--vis evolution andcreationism, he should of course have called upon (one strand in) Feyerabend, notPopper.


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sciencehas come to bejustified more by its paradigmatic pedigree thanby its progressive aspirations. (Italics mine)

It is hardto understand whatFuller is actually saying here, because ofhis employment of the extremely vague (and undefined in his text)termthe normativestructure of science. But, as my italics bring out,Fuller here seems to be trying to imply (without quite stating it, forthen its falsity would I think be quite plain) that there is a causal rela-tion between Kuhns victory [sic] in his struggle against Popper onone hand and recent public understanding of sciences legitimacy onthe other. But, as Fuller admits elsewhere (e.g., p. 21), this is surelynonsense: Kuhns influence on how science is actually done is virtu-ally nil, and his influence even on science-apologetics has been

extremely limited.9

Fullerclaimsto be righting the historical record. Chapter 1 of hisbook is ostensibly an attempt to tell the truth about the debatebetween Kuhn and Popper,which Fuller claims started in 1965 on theoccasion of their famous public encounter in London.

ButFullershows no signof understandingthesubtleandcoruscat-ingcritique of Popperimplicitlypresent already in Kuhns StructureofScientificRevolutions (hereafter, SSR).10 Indeed,he doesnot even regis-ter itspresence. Again, this is evidence of bad scholarship. It is a terri-blefatalfailing/absence in a book supposedly about the Kuhnversus Popper debate. That debate was openedinthe pages ofSSR.

One of the points made by Kuhn against Popper there is that it is

not clear that Poppers vision of science actually succeeds in being avision ofscienceat all. Of science, that is, as opposed to philosophy.11

To the kind of activity engaged in by the pre-Socratics, for instance,whoconjured bold hypotheseswhich they then subjectedto criticism.The pre-Socratics are closer to Poppers image of science than, say,Galtonian chemists are. I guess Popperians like to make bold hypoth-eses; it is certainly bold to count as good scientists a group of think-ers who were not evidently doing sciencesystematic study of how


9. The seemingly deliberately deceitful rhetoric here in Fuller is in my view shame-ful. Likewise, in the especially risible claims that Fuller makes for Kuhns influence onpage 86, where we find for instance that Kuhn is to blame for the (alleged) fact that sci-entists and philosophers accept the counter-intuitive implication that reality consistsof many distinct worlds, each roughly corresponding to a scientific discipline!

10. Forjustificationof these claims, seeSharrock andRead,Kuhn, 42,43,101-16,121-26, 156, 219n22.11. Are Popperians subject to a deformation professionelle, here? It is so tempting,

as a philosopher, to make science look rather like . . . philosophy.


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the world actually works, as opposed to open-ended unevidencedspeculationat all, and to count as less good scientists a group ofthinkers/practitioners who are actually among scientists usualparadigms for what science is!

Of this important point, as with all the other points Kuhn makes inSSRagainst Popper, there is in the book of Fullers under review notrace.12

All this is of course a great shame, for Fuller is a clever man, full ofbibliographies and erudition and ideas. Why has he come to this?Why has this wit and this wide knowledge produced a veritable mineof misinformation for the lay reader?

What may be quite a large part of the answer is (involuntarily?)

confessed, again, in his books introduction, and is worth quoting atlength:

Epistemology . . . is now more than ever preoccupied with face-savingexercisesto shoreup expertise, theelusive quest forwhat philosopherscall credible testimony and sociologists call, more brutally, boundarymaintenance.This is a project thatKuhn couldunderstand. Incontrast,when founding a field called social epistemology fifteen years ago, Idefined the social character of knowledge in terms of the need to bringorder to an inherently divisive situation consisting of many self-inter-ested and fallible agents. This is a project Popper could understand.However, most of those who nowadays call themselves social episte-mologistsare concernedwithdeterminingthe spontaneous patterns ofdeference in a socially distributed knowledge system: Who should I

believe? This pressing question is more likely to be answered by dele-

gating than assuming responsibility for whatever informs onesactions. As students of political thought will appreciate, it is as ifKuhns triumph overPopper hasenabled social epistemologists to takethe great leap backward. (pp. 4-5)

Poor Fuller. How green was his valley. What blissit was, to be alivein those days of the founding of a discipline, his very own discipline;and how cruelly it has been taken from him. By those dreadfulKuhnians!

What the unfolding of this paragraph of Fullers (presumablyinvoluntarily) discloses is that the clause early on, In contrast, is in


12. Just recallthe famousopening sentence ofSSR, going atthe heart ofthe method-

ology used by previous philosophers of science, most obviously Popper and Carnap.However, it is true that Kuhns book is not primarily a polemic against Popper, or anyother philosopher. This is perhaps its greatest merit: instead of nitpicking within theestablished framework, it proposes a different framework altogether.


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fact no contrast.Fuller, although his owndicta speak against it, wantsbadly to maintain the boundary of his discipline. He is terriblyannoyed that an image of Kuhn (and, as I made clear above, this image isvery largely false; that is the one decent point that Fuller makes!) hasmessed up his own field, that is, has taken his field in a directionquite different to that in which he, Fuller, hoped it would go. Back-wards, allegedly.

Fuller should have considered alternatives. For starters, that hehad, by his own strictures, no right to police his own field. The ideaof a fields founder having parental rights over it is deeply naive. 13

And indeed, yet more challenging alternatives. For example, thathis field might not have been well defined or well founded in the

firstplace.And/orthatitmaybeofverylittleuse,orevenmeaning,inany case. And/or that it is a flawed attempt to substitute what hasbeen done already, with deep care and subtlety, by others: I wouldargue that Wittgenstein, Winch, Louch, Harold Garfinkel, and someof their followers have already undertaken the main tasksof what couldactually deserve to be called social epistemology, the understand-ing of how knowledge is socially produced. (A drop of Wittgensteinian ethnomethodology, in this reviewers opinion, isworth more than a cloud of Fullerian philosophy.)

What Fuller is claiming, in the paragraph I have quoted above, isthat he has been misunderstood and traduced, that his followersare not his followers, and so on. He has suffered the same fate asKuhn. Butbecause he blamesKuhnianismforthis, he decidesto get

his revengebut not by patiently explaining how Kuhns follow-ers have got Kuhn wrong. Rather by interleaving tiny fragments ofsuch an explanation with a series of attempts quite literally to tarKuhn by association with the brushes of McCarthyism, Nazism, Sta-


13. Itis important to note that thevery ideaof socialepistemologylikemany ideasin late 20th-century philosophydeveloped in a favorable intellectual climate inwhich thefocusof attention wasshiftingfrom an individualknower to a communityofknowers, from a theoretical structureof well-ordered truthsto the rather messier prac-tice of discovering, debating, changing, updating,and applying knowledge. The influ-ence of Wittgenstein, probably the most important philosopher of the 20th centuryandwho in passingFuller also tries to savagein the title under reviewis quite visiblein thismatter. Of course, Wittgensteinwas not alone in forcingthe reconceptualizationof epistemology which Fuller now claims for his own: Kuhn, more than any other phi-

losopher of science, made the point explicit. (Of course, there are views and ideas thatare genuinely Fullers, but their existence is inconceivable without Wittgenstein andKuhn in the backgroundeven if he largely [and perhaps willfully] misunderstoodthem.)


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linism, and so on. Hehopes thathis assault onKuhnsreputation mayenable him to regain possession of social epistemology, so that when(and surely it will be soon!!) our universities are clamoring to endowchairs in social epistemology, it will be Fuller and not Kuhn who willbe revered as the (grand-)father of the discipline, have chairs namedafter him, and so on. Fuller does not see the obvious: that the repu-tationthat will more probably be tarred, irreparably, in thisprocess, isthe (humbler) reputation of the assaulter. Of Steve Fuller.

Perhaps Fuller might have done better, then, to have taken aslightly humbler and less comfortable route. Perhaps he should haveconsidered the possibility that the biggest single reason for Kuhnshighreputation(in some quarters) is that hewasa fairlybrave,innova-

tive, and deep thinker, something of a Wittgenstein of the sciences,onemighteven say. Someone likely toberead with passionateinterestand learnt from, long after Fullers works and mine are dead andgone, and, dare I say it, perhaps Poppers too.

But whether Kuhn and/or Popper will survive for some time intothe canon of philosophy, it is in the endjust ridiculous for Fuller tocitePopper as an intellectual ally. Popper would, I suspect, be utterlyappalled by the methodology of this book of Fullers. He wouldconsider it an unscientific rant, and a polemical piece of writing thatdoesnot satisfy thebasic criteria Popperbelievedshouldcharacterizephilosophical prose: namely, proceeding by careful statement, analy-sis, and criticism of arguments; anticipating objections and answer-ing themhonestly; and soon.He would see right through Fullerspseudo-

historicist desire tobe foundinga fieldof (supposedly!) immensepoliticalsig-nificance. Myown attitude is not dissimilar to that that I have imputedto Popper here. I careabout the things thatFuller is talking about; andI even have a similar attitude to his to these things, at a number ofpoints. Like him, for instance, I am a passionate advocate of demo-cratic politics, and I try to be a radical questioner of the direction ofsome contemporary science. Like him, I am critical of much big sci-ence and of the corporatization of science and of the academy. (Thenagain, Kuhn too was critical of big science; Fuller has to pirouettemore madly thanusual, to avoid admitting this transparently!) In theend, I think that Fullers book will be positively harmful because it isliable to tarnishcauses such as those that I share with himwith a kindof . . . guiltby association (andguiltby associationis something Fuller

understands well: it is, sadly, close to being his standard trope). IfGreen or Left criticisms of the contemporary science establishmentare brought into disrepute by Fuller, that will be bad news, a stupid

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owngoal.The moral is:wemust not letvoices like Fullers be left tosound likethey actuallyhave anything genuinelyLeft or radical aboutthem. In terms of intellectual substance, they do not.

Even soeven in light of how this issue may then be of some realimportance beyond the ivory tower, beyond the question of rescuingthe reputation of a major philosopher (Kuhn)I nevertheless apolo-gize if any readers have been offended by the intemperate tone ofparts of this review essay thusfar. Inmitigation, it may beworth men-tioning that another cause of my frustration is this: a number of ushave for several years now been engaged, against perhaps our betterjudgment, in an attempt rationally and sensibly to debate these mat-ters with Steve Fuller, in person in various public and private fora,

and in print.

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We hoped that he might come to understand ratherbetter the nature of Kuhns project, or at least to stop publishingdressed-up gossipy speculations, innuendos, and plain falsehoodsabout it.ThepublicationofKuhn vs.Popper showsthat ourhopes werequite in vain.

In sum: this book offers only a cartoon opposition of a fake Pop-per toa fakeKuhn. Itfails totakethe opportunityof rewriting for awider public the legend of Thomas Kuhn such that more people willbe able to understand who Kuhn really was and what he really said.Instead, it offers simply a fictive figure produced by an (inaccurate)recasting of and (propagandistic) rewriting of the history of the his-tory and philosophy of science.

NICKLES ET AL. IN FOCUS

Putting down Fullers book and picking up Nickless is like mov-ing from a squalid rubbish dump to a green meadow. Ones spirit isalmost overwhelmed, temporarily, by the sudden difference.

Nickless book, published simultaneously in paperback and hard-back in the new Contemporary Philosophy in Focus series from Cam-bridge, is a useful collection on Kuhn. Almost every essay is of fairlyhigh quality. Together, they add up to a diverse set of influential per-spectives on Kuhns philosophy of science. There is no one focus,


14. A particularly fine example is Thomas Uebel, The Poverty of ConstructivistHistory (and Policy Advice), in History of Philosophy and Science, edited by M.Heidelberger and F. Stadler (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer, 2002), 379-89.


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thoughthere is an orientation, deriving from Nickless own interests,towards relating Kuhns ideas to recent cognitive science.

The introduction begins, slightly unfortunately, by echoingFullers implication that Kuhn has been immensely influential.Nickles cites (p. 1) the way in which terms that Kuhn coined havebecome household phrases, but omits to make clear that this doesnot in itself imply that Kuhns thought (as opposed to a jargon verylooselyderivedfrom that thought) succeededin havinganyinfluenceat all, for these phrases mostly mean just what Kuhn did not wantthem to. Nickless main contribution to the book is however his ownessay, which demands to beread alongside the otheressays in the col-lection that are focused on cognitive science.

Nickless Normal Science: From Logic to Case-Based and Model-Based Reasoning is an interesting effort to try to cognitive-scientizeKuhn. Nickles argues (more on this in the discussion of Barnessessay, below) that normal science is Kuhns real topic. He goes so faras to suggest that Kuhns own epistemology of science failed tohandle adequately revolutionary breakouts from the old frame-work (p. 155). (This cannot be quite right: Kuhn, for the first time,gives an account ofall of science, normal andrevolutionaryalike.Kuhns real topic was conceptual change[and the crucialness of thenormal lackof conceptual change] in science.)15 Nickles hopes tounderstand normal science as routinized activity that can be under-stood as a complexification of how artificial intelligence engineers/scientists understand such activity (p. 143). But he precisely follows

Kuhn in challenging

the traditional Leibnizean-Enlightenment conception of perfect fullyjustified knowledge as verbally explicit, including the reduction of pro-cedures and skills to rules. Rule-based performance is often methodicalin the pejorative sensemechanical, plodding, inefficient, andnonintuitive,by contrast with thefluidityofexpertperformance.(p. 151)


15. Nickles closes his essay by claiming that Kuhn largely missed the opportunityto extend his evolutionary account [of scientific development] to normal science (p.169). Maybe Kuhn should have spoken more about the presence of conceptual changein normal science. But the pointcontra Nickles (and Fuller)is that Kuhn is not bestread ashavingoffered usa model ofscience atall.He was, ashe increasingly insisted,atheart (even if not by training) a philosopher. Normal scienceand revolutionary sci-ence arenot models butpictures. Their therapeutic point is to return us to sciencetoan understanding of science, as for the first time, which understands the whole phe-nomenon of science and not (as with the Positivists and Falsificationists) mere frag-ments of it.


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The difficulty, once onehas correctly understoodKuhn thus as break-ing through the rule fetish that has fettered many philosophers(including many Wittgensteinians) and social and cognitive scien-tists alike, is in seeing what cognitive science can actually add toKuhns own words. Understanding verbally inexplicit knowledge insucha way thatyou do not smuggle backina logico-linguistic charac-ter to it (as the concept of tacit knowledge nearly always does, forinstance) leaves very little room forcognitive science to work in.Fullyscientizable knowledgefully routinized verbally inexplicitknowledgewould notactually beknowledgeat all, no more than achess-playing machine or a computer (or a book!) knowsor under-stands anything. This is the lesson Kuhn taught, following

Wittgenstein: any interesting sense in which an activity can be algor-ithmically understoodorotherwise rendered in some way such thatscientistscan tell something useful about its naturefor example,such that (cognitive)scientistscan tell us (and scientifically!) abouthow exemplars can be systematically/repeatedly followedis not asense compatible with the activity being a human activity: flexible,accountable, reflexive.16 As the ethnomethodologists might put it: acultural dope who can be rendered by a scientific account cannoteven demonstrate the level of expert performance necessary tounderstandthemostbasicnovel conversational implicature, letaloneto be even the most basic of normal scientists.

Nancy Nersessian, in Kuhn, Conceptual Change, and CognitiveScience, presents an explicitly Wittgensteinian theory of con-

cepts,whichshewants toundergird, understand, andextendKuhn:

What one acquires in learning a conceptual structure are not sets ofdefining characteristics and specifiable rules for the concepts that par-ticipate in the problem exemplars comprised by the paradigm. Rather,one acquires sets of family resemblances that include both similari-ties and differences among instances. In presenting this view, Kuhnexplicitly drew from the philosopher Wittgenstein, who in his Philo-sophical Investigationshad argued against the classical view of con-cepts, originating with Plato and Aristotle and carried into twentieth-century philosophical analysis by Frege and Russell. (p. 180)

The problem with this is that it has Wittgenstein offering us a rivalnominalist, or Anti-Realisttheory of concepts. This was just what


16. See John Preston and Mark Bishop, eds.,Views into the Chinese Room: New Essayson Searle and Artificial Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), fordiscussion.


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Wittgenstein did not want to do. See section 65 ofPhilosophicalInvestigations:

Instead of producing something commonto all that we call language, Iam saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common whichmakes us use the same word for all, but that they are relatedto oneanother in many different ways. Andit is because of this relationship, orthese relationships, that we call them all language. (Italics mine)

As is made even clearer in Wittgensteins subsequent discussion andin themetaphilosophical sections that follow, this is no theoryat all,and certainly not the endorsement of an Anti-Realist rival account(e.g., a sociological or cognitive scientific account) to the classical

account.Nersessian argues, allegedly following Wittgenstein, that con-cepts showgraded structures. That is, some instances of a given con-cept are better examples of the concept than other instances (p. 181).But whenin a real contextwe say, That is a good example, what wemean to index is usually that it clearly/certainly is anexample,it is anx, as opposed to possibly not being anx at all. The problem withaccounts such as Nersessians, and the same problem recurs in otheressays in the collection (see below), is that they draw on crude psy-chology, crude experimentation, in undergirding their weirdclaims with alleged empirical data. The dataabout what people sayis a good exampleof whatcome almost entirely from entirelyartifi-c ia l , i rreal contexts , where people are s imply asked

decontextualized questions such as Which of these is a good exam-ple of a bird? The results of such bizarre/arbitrary/random/artifi-cial/abstract questionings, which mostly involve asking questionsthat just do not mean anything (for often the selection offered isamong things that are, to continue with this example, all birds), are, Isubmit, of no evidential value whatsoever.

Now, Nersessian rightly points out that Kuhn was himself quiteattracted at times to approaches that at least bear some resemblancestothose that I have here criticized. Famously, hereliedquite heavilyinhis mostfamouswork on Gestalt psychology. And, as Nersessian setsout, his late work evinced a return topsychology, this time with a spe-cifically cognitive scientific bent. I think that the primary reason whyKuhns last book was left unfinished at his death was that there wasno way to marry his deep philosophical insight to the biological andcognitive scientific material that he came to hope might explain it, ashe had(evidently) neversatisfactorilyexplained hisphilosophyto his



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audience.17 I believe that evolutionary biology, child psychology, andcognitive science could never give Kuhn what he wantedaphiloso-

phyof and for science, a way of enabling people (including himself)better to understand what science is, to avoid misunderstanding itsdifferent aspects. I think that Kuhn may have more or less realizedthis too, as he started to die, and saw that his work would never becompleted.

Nersessiansessay is very abstract in parts, and the parts which arenot and which are reasonably compelling are basically either com-mon sense orhistoricallyestablished: through good historiography(and biography and autobiography) of experimentation. Kuhn neednot, I think, be sorry not to have taken up more thoroughgoingly

Nersessians intriguing but(in theend) ineffective andmisfiring invi-tation to cognitive science.The classiest essay in the collection that focuses on cognitive sci-

ence is that by Barker, Chen, and Andersen, on Kuhn on Conceptsand Categorization. Its subtle nature is quite beyond any easy sum-mary. Its task, like Nersessians, is to follow through the Roschianrevolution in psychology, in relation to Kuhns writings. I will there-fore restrict myself to saying that I think this task again founders onthe conceptual incoherence of the Roschian revolution. As sug-gested above, the alleged graded structure of concepts (p. 219)plays no part in Wittgensteins account, for good reason: it makes nosense.Take thispassagefromthe Barker-Chen-Andersen discussion:

The prototype of the concept chair . . . includes such features as thenumber of legs, the type of back, and the construction materials, yield-ing (for U.S. or European informants) a representation very similar tothefour-legged straight-backedkind often seenin a dining room.Otherkindsof chairs, such as modernistic single-pedestal armchairs, are lesstypical, and barstools are atypical. Thesedifferentdegrees in typicalityconstitute thegraded structureof theconcept.(pp. 221-22,italicsmine)

The authors self-refute in the very utterance of the phrase Otherkinds of chairs: modernistic armchairs are still chairs! Not 75%chairs, or something like that. Less typical could mean manythings: less common, less good, less badcompare the expressiontypical day at the office! The theory of concepts here is, I am afraid,


17. I am indebted here to remarks of James Conant, Kuhns literary executor, in aclass on Kuhn at the University of Chicago in 2001. However, we will have to wait formuch fuller publication of Kuhnsnachlass, including of his uncompleted last book, inorder to confirm or deny my thought here.


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founded on a misreading of Wittgenstein, on bad philosophy, and(again) oncrudescientistic psychology.

These three essays in Nickless book centered on cognitive scienceall aim to show that Kuhns work would have profited from a closerengagementwith/adoption of cognitive science. They make an inter-esting (if sometimes repetitive) case. The case is presented, cumula-tively, as well I think as it can be or has ever been. Thus its failure is ofno little significance.

And one bottom line, then, is this: it is a matter of regret thatNickleshasnooneinhisbookto question the cognitivescience read-ing of Kuhn, and more specifically to argue, as I (like otherWittgensteinians or ethnomethodologists) would, that the prepon-

derance of Kuhns philosophy of science, properly understood, seri-ously undermines thesuggestionthat there is anysuch thing as cogni-tive science, and undermines(though of course less definitively) theidea that there ever will/could be. Again, let us recall the foundingcontrast, in the preface toSSR, between the social and the natural sci-ences. It is arguably salient to claimthatthe points Kuhnmakes aboutthe social sciences can by and large be extended to the cognitive sci-ences: they arelargely disciplineswithout a paradigm, andweshouldnotassume that it would make sense for them to try self-consciouslyto acquire one.

Let me close by indicating very briefly something of the quality ofthree more of the essays on diverse subject matters in this collection,and the work they help do in moving us beyond the legend of Kuhn

closer to a rational and hermeneutically sound assessment of his vir-tues and problems.

Joseph Rouses essay will, to those familiar with his helpful workon Kuhn, offer little new in the way of conclusions, but does offer asharper andbetter exemplifiedaccount than he has succeeded in offer-ing in the past; and this is really quite rhetorically crucial, given histhesis: that it is Kuhns essentiallyexemplifiedaccount of scienceas

practicethat is crucial. In order to avoid the potential charge of prag-matic self-refutation, Rouse needed to practice what he preached, ashe has here. Rouses conclusion (which he then goes on to example),that Kuhns philosophical perspective [can] accommodate far-reaching critical attitudestoward thesciences andtheirpervasive rolein our world (p. 118), stands as a healthy antidote to Fullers

criticisms.



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Barry Barnes, in his intriguing Thomas Kuhn and the Problem ofSocial Order in Science, questions (p. 124), like Rouse, the largeview of Kuhn taken by most who engage with his work (including,in quite differentways, Friedmansfine essay, andalsoLonginosandWorralls contributions to this volume). The large view focuses onKuhns alleged grand historical vision or model of science and scien-tific change; the alternative view, that Barnes (along perhaps withRouse, Nickles, and certainly myself) explicitly favors, holds that theforemost value and significance of Kuhns work lies in its revelatorytreatment of scientific activity and the mundane details of everydayscientific practice (p. 124). The trouble with Barness essay is that,against his intentions, his toois in the enda large view, unlike those

thoroughgoingly exemplified takes on Kuhn put forward (princi-pally) by Wittgensteinians and their intellectual allies, such as theethnomethodologists.Barnespowerfully criticizes the know-nothinganti-elitism of Fullers view of Kuhn and science (p. 140), but ulti-mately Barnes himself has an imperial vision of science, and himselffalls thus into havinga large viewinhiscase, again, an Anti-Real-ist theory of science. (See p. 129 for Barness endorsement of the the-ory of Finitism, which, problematically, he finds in Kuhn andWittgenstein; seep. 134for Barness continuedadherence tosociologyof scientific knowledge (SSK) epistemology, which ultimately ismerely a mirror of and a rival to traditional Realist and otherepistemologies, not [as in Wittgenstein and in most of Kuhn] a breakwith the obsessive search foranylarge epistemology.)

And finally, there is John Worralls Normal Science and Dogma-tism, Paradigms and Progress: Kuhn versus Popper and Lakatos.As one might hope from the title, Worrall offers aproperpro-Popperperspective on the Kuhn versus Popper debate. He attemptsfairness,even while taking up a stance within the debate that is critical ofKuhn. Worralls essay shows what Fullers book might have been, ifFuller had been concerned to be fair and reasonable. As a card-carry-ing Kuhnian, I would take issue withquite a numberof Worralls con-tentions, practices, and conclusions, including his problematic ten-dency to continue the Popperian vice of wanting to picture thescientist as a magisterial figure awfully like a metaphysical philoso-pher(see especiallyp. 76), andhisapparent failure to read Kuhnshis-torical case studies as a crucial part of his corpus.

In other words: from my perspective, Worrall is a little like Fuller,except for a key difference. Whether ornot one is a Kuhnian, Worrall is(like most of Nickless authors) quite clearly challenging, worth read-



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ing, and someone who at least tries to move the debate forward,whereas Fuller simplyis none of these.18

Dr. Rupert Read is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Hisprevious publications includeThe New Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2000, coedited withAlice Crary) andKuhn(Polity, 2002, coauthored with Wes Sharrock). He is at presentworking on a collection entitled Film as Philosophy (forthcoming with Palgrave,coedited withJerry Goodenough), and on a series of articles on Wittgensteincoauthoredwith Phil Hutchinson. He is also a Green Party City Councillor in Norwich.


18. Thanks for very helpful comments go to Bojana Mladenovic (especially), WesSharrock,Phil Hutchinson,Stefano Gattei, andJohn Preston. It is extremely important,given theregrettablynecessarytone andcontent of part of thisreview article, that noneofthesephilosophersbe heldin theslightest responsible forthe views expressedabove,which as formulated are, as ever, mine alone.

rupert read - kuhn vs popper

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