Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Time (review)

Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 472 pp.

Fuller claims to account for why a major intellectual moment—a reconceptualization of the nature of science—took the shape it did. Fuller's perspective remains throughout relentlessly presentist and conspiratorial: in the 1950s James Bryant Conant and the mandarins of power successfully, he says, scripted institutional structures for the natural sciences, science policy, science studies, and philosophy of science that endure to this day. The purpose was to ensure American federal dollars for science research without having to say whether or how the research benefited taxpayers. Fuller's account proceeds via a narrative reconstruction of the influential but (so he says) unremittingly negative impact of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's work, Fuller maintains, provided invaluable philosophical rationales insulating Big Science from public accountability. Fuller finds in Kuhn's thought a faux revolution, one pretending to open science to wider public understanding. Problems emerge, Fuller thinks, once Structure is read as a sociological tract: what sort of community is a community constituted by paradigms, and to what effect? Fuller's Kuhn rationalizes the scientific community as the source and best enforcer of disciplinary norms, and Fuller argues that Kuhn's vision serves to insulate the natural sciences from pressures to serve the larger community on which it financially depends—scientists need answer only to one another. Big Science secures federal dollars but avoids scrutiny by or accountability to the public. Fuller's narrative consists primarily of a loose chain of associations and accusations. Yet, let me also say, important issues of science policy motivate and animate his book. Whether to forgive Fuller his excesses I leave as an exercise for the reader.