Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Early Social Studies of Science in Japan

In this commentary, I examine early responses to Thomas Kuhn’s ideas in Japan and show how Kuhn’s ideas stimulated discussion in social studies of science in the 1970s and 1980s and their subsequent significance.

Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; second edition, 1970) was introduced into Japanese-language scholarship in the early 1970s. Two things set the stage for Japan’s reception of Kuhn’s ideas. One was political and cultural upheaval after the revolutionary year of 1968. For a decade or so thereafter, there were intellectual and cultural trends strongly opposed to science. The other factor was the Japanese tradition of Marxist or Marxism-inspired social studies of science. In 1932 and 1934, two Japanese versions of Nikolai I. Bukharin’s edited volume Science at the Crossroads, which included Boris Hessen’s work, had appeared. After World War II, the works of John D. Bernal and Edgar Zilsel were translated into Japanese (Bernal 1951; Zilsel 1967). The principal theoretical tenet of the school that arose out of these writings in Japan was, very roughly, a kind of social determinism of science, the idea that science as a superstructure could be determined by its social base, or at least understood as a part of social phenomena.

In the work of Hirosige Tetu (1928–75), foremost among scholars of social studies of science in Japan at that time, the tradition of social studies of science converged with the antiscience movement. Outside Japan, he is probably better known as a historian of physics of Kuhn’s generation. His other specialty was sociohistorical studies of science and technology in Japan. The theoretical basis of his approach was the idea of taiseika (体制化), which I tentatively translate as “regimization.” The institutionalization of science that took place in the nineteenth century established science as a social institution, was responsible for the foundation of educational institutions and professional organizations, and created the very profession of scientist. Hirosige claimed that, after the two world wars, science and technology were even more closely integrated into the political and economic regime, to the extent that the two were mutually dependent. This is what he called taiseika. From this perspective, Hirosige laid the foundations for a social history of science whose goal was to understand the close connections between science and the sociopolitical regime, and his principal work (1973) applied this framework to the social history of science both in Japan and elsewhere.

Being a historian of physics, Hirosige must have been well aware of Kuhn’s work, but he showed little interest in Structure. The philosopher of science Noe Keiichi (2008: 15–16) remembers a talk in 1971 in which Hirosige commented that “Kuhn seems too obsessed by the paradigm of paradigm.” Hirosige’s indifference to paradigm was probably due not just to its ambiguity, as Noe suggests, but also to the limitations of Kuhn’s approach. The idea of “regimization” implied that developments of science and technology in the twentieth century could no longer be considered as an autonomous process determined by its internal machinery, like a paradigm. Rather, the normal state of affairs became a ceaseless interaction between science and the political and economic systems. Kuhn’s notion of normal science probably did not seem, to Hirosige, to be the most important aspect of science.

Also in 1971, Nakayama Shigeru published a Japanese translation of Structure. Nakayama, a historian of science and student of Kuhn’s at Harvard, has published numerous works in English and Japanese on a wide range of topics in the history of science. Although originally trained in physics, Nakayama was deeply in the tradition of social studies of science in Japan until he encountered Kuhn’s work, which he took as suggesting the limitations of the Marxist social determinist approach. One of Nakayama’s earliest usages of paradigm appeared in his 1974 book, Science as History (Rekishi toshiteno gakumon 歴史としての学問), a semipopular account of the social history of science. Admitting that Kuhn gave various meanings to the word paradigm, he used it not in the methodological or philosophical sense but...