The Normal Scientific Point of View of Practicing Scientists

1 My Kuhnianism

Thomas Kuhn himself was obliged to withdraw his own term paradigm (Kuhn 1970). After that, most academics dropped the use of Kuhnian concepts. Although mostly abandoned in the history of the scientific community, I insist that the original Kuhnian definition can be a useful tool when describing the history of science. I remain a stern Kuhnian to this day, much more than Kuhn himself. One example is my biography of Hideyo Noguchi (Nakayama 1978). Using completely Kuhnian terms, I have evaluated him to be a normal scientist at the stage of Robert Koch’s paradigm that barely bears fruit any more.

In this article I present my own version of Kuhnianism with sympathetic inclination toward the practicing scientific community, rather than toward the general public (including professional philosophers of science). Furthermore, I have an old sense of Marxism, similar to that of Jerome Ravetz. In conclusion, I will develop Kuhnian terms further to connect social substratum and superstructure.

2 The Way Practicing Scientists See Paradigms

When I first encountered Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I immediately thought that his “paradigm/normal-science” scheme was a view of science close to the experience of practicing scientists, whereas the conventional philosophies of science, such as that of logical empiricism, were not relevant to what scientists were actually doing. Upon my Japanese translation for fellow practicing scientists, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure appeared to be the most (or only) acceptable philosophy of science, particularly in physical science communities. They accepted the major Kuhnian thesis without issue.

Though the terms paradigm and normal science are quite new to those practitioners, they use the twofold system of paradigm and normal science as a criterion to judge the quality of their past achievements. They often cynically and dismissively employ these words in contexts such as, “I have remained just a normal scientist throughout my life, never being able to conceive or generate a paradigm.” I found this to be almost same in the Western community when I attended a Copernican symposium in 1972. Beyond Copernicus, people there discussed the thesis of Kuhn, who had published The Copernican Revolution in 1957. It was said that “when Thomas Kuhn was affiliated with Harvard, everybody was doing only normal science, what a shame!”

This is, in a sense, similar to Karl R. Popper’s accusation, “Down with normal science” (Popper 1970), but while Popper blamed Kuhn’s term “normal science” normatively as representing a degenerated behavior of scientists, practitioners know that the majority of scientists (more than 99 percent) were actually engaged in normal scientific activity.

In his “Postscript–1969”, Kuhn tried to revise paradigm into exemplar or disciplinary matrix. At the time, I thought that people might not adopt it. And it so happened that paradigm became interchangeable with other terms, on a case-by-case basis, such as a theory, conceptual scheme, and even special instruments or experimental animals: it always meant something to be shared by a community to promote its normal scientific progress. Perhaps a more revealing part of the definition of paradigm is that its function was to imitate the preceding works, using them as a model or exemplar. We can exemplify the course of development of celestial mechanics, the direct heir of the Newtonian paradigm. Instead of conscious application of hypothesis and test, as some philosophers of science claim, practitioners are imitating all the time.

Paradigm depends on the research milieu involved. It may not be defined so strictly, and scientists are not actually following every logically proven theory. But this depends on a somewhat more loosely organized consensus, often more uncertain, that perhaps awaits further clarification.

Kuhn often complained that the philosophers of science who are ignorant about what scientists actually do should read scientific technical papers to gain a better understanding of the context. I think ordinary philosophers are not interested in reading a scientific paper. They do not understand what normal science is but often only construct the image of science out of philosophical discussions.

Kuhn used the rest of his time to illustrate what normal science is and persuade philosophers to...