Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in South Korea

When South Korea was struggling through the dark age of an authoritarian regime during the 1980s, spot-checking at the main gate was a common scene of Korean university life. The declared purpose was to take away potentially dangerous items, such as things used to make Molotov cocktails. But student leaders were not so stupid as to try to bring such crucial items for demonstrations through the police line at the gate. So most of the actual items confiscated were books with titles that police thought “improper” for students with healthy thoughts to read. Thomas S. Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (or, more precisely, one of its translations) was among them. The reason was clear and simple: the title of Kuhn’s book contains the word revolution, which during the 1980s was an extremely alarming word in Korea. I, a moderate physics student in the late 1980s, lost to police my copy of Theda Skocpol’s 1979 States and Social Revolutions.¹ Sometimes, I wonder what Kuhn might have said if he knew his book was classified in the same taxonomic group as Skocpol’s.

Kuhn’s Structure clearly influenced Korean intellectuals across disciplines, although the exact nature of its influence varies from one field to another. I will try to suggest a short and inevitably partial description of the influence, especially on those scholars who later emerged as members of Korean STS communities. In order to make my description less subjective, I use the two major Korean databases of articles, KISS and DBPIA, which are widely used by Korean scholars.² KISS and DBPIA store PDF-format articles published in Korean academic journals as well as some relevant news articles and recent e-books. Although most of their articles (especially those in the humanities and social sciences) are written in Korean, many of them have English abstracts so that non-Korean speakers may search the databases using English titles and guess at the main ideas of the articles. That’s why I chose not to transliterate the titles of Korean papers I discuss here. Unless otherwise indicated, all the articles I discuss are written in Korean.

I first explain how Kuhn was introduced to Korea in various formats and examine the reception and usage of two translations (1980 and 1981) of Structure. ThenI discuss the broader reception of Kuhn’s ideas across the fields based on published journal articles. I also briefly mention how Structure, despite its condensed and difficult-to-translate sentences, obtained its popularity as a text for essay assignments for Korean college students. In the last part of the essay, I consider the rather programmatic question of more fruitful ways of go beyond the Kuhnian legacy in Korean STS contexts.

1 Introducing and Translating Kuhn in South Korea

Most likely the first introduction of Thomas Kuhn’s ideas and his Structure to Korean intellectuals occurred during the 1970s. Sang-yong Song, after having been trained as a historian of science in Indiana, returned to Korea in 1969 and started to read Structure with his students at Seoul National University in 1970 (Song 2012). He taught general education courses for students with mixed backgrounds, and it seemed that reading through Kuhn’s difficult text made an impression on the students. A few of my colleagues in the College of Human Sciences of Hanyang University still vividly remember the intensity of Song’s class and Kuhn’s refreshing views of science. During the 1970s, a few scholars, including Kwang-woong Kim (public administration), Young-sik Kim (history of science), and Chungmin Lee (linguistics), contributed commentaries to major newspapers, presenting main points of Kuhn’s Structure.

The year 1980 was a turning point for the Korean reception of Kuhn. The first Korean translation of Structure appeared from Ewha Womans University Press. It is a translation of the second edition of Structure, published in 1970, and according to its copyright explanation, the Ewha Womans University Press obtained implicit approval from the University of Chicago Press through the US Embassy in Seoul. The translator, Hyung Cho, was a sociologist working mostly on...