Kuhn and the Cognitive Revolution

I. Introduction

The Kuhnian revolution and the cognitive revolution began at approximately the same time. There are notable connections among the problems with which each revolution was grappling, and with hindsight one can construct significant parallels between the views of knowledge, perception, and learning developed in each. However, by and large Thomas Kuhn never utilized research in the cognitive sciences that would have furthered his own paradigm in ways I think he would have found agreeable. I have found this puzzling, since he did not have the traditional philosophical aversion to “psychologizing” and in fact began his revolution by drawing on insights from both Gestalt psychology and the “New Look” psychology that also inspired his corevolutionaries, Norwood Russell Hanson and Paul Feyerabend. Indeed, the research project outlined in Structure seems intrinsically historical, philosophical, and psychological. ¹ However, except for some references to research in psycholinguistics, psychology dropped out of Kuhn’s post-Structure published articulations of his views just at the time when the cognitive revolution was beginning to provide accounts of representation, problem-solving, and learning that I believe to be pertinent to his intuitive insights. ² In this paper I will discuss in what ways the Kuhnian revolution might be furthered today in light of the cognitive revolution. In particular, I will focus on those issues that relate most closely to the efforts of myself and a few other philosophers to develop a cognitively informed philosophy and history of science.

It is likely that I have always viewed Structure through a cognitive lens. Unlike the situation today, Structure was not required reading for a philosopher-in-training in the 1970s. By the time I did read it, I was convinced by the arguments put forward by W. V. O. Quine and others that epistemological theories need to be informed by our best accounts of human reasoners developed by the science of psychology. However, reading Jerome Bruner, Jacqueline Goodnow, and George Austin’s Study of Thinking and George Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl Pribram’s Plans and the Structure of Behavior—which are now seen to be seminal works in the cognitive revolution—convinced me that Quine was fundamentally wrong in accepting what I called the “third dogma”: behaviorist psychology. ³ Further, I had always believed that the history of scientific change was of central importance to the problem of conceptual change. My research program was—and continues to be—to figure out how to put cognitive psychology, history, and philosophy together to understand scientific discovery and change. Understanding conceptual change would require going beyond the customary examination of conceptual structures themselves to examine both how science has been and is practiced by individuals and communities, and how humans think. Developing such an account requires a “cognitive-historical” method of analysis, as will be discussed below in section II.

There are many parallels between the analyses presented by the “historicist” philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, whom I had read, and Kuhn. Feyerabend offered substantive critiques of positivist accounts of conceptual change, and like Kuhn he drew on “New Look” and Gestalt psychology in his account. However, his histories of science were “philosophers’ histories,” though more colorful and thus more pleasurable to read than most—more an exercise of fitting the data to the theory than historical analysis. Further, I found his “anything goes” attitude toward knowledge unpalatable. Kuhn, although considered a historian by philosophers of the time, attempted a similar integration of psychology and history, did not put science and witchcraft on a par, did serious history, and was struggling to articulate a realist view of science consonant with noncumulative paradigm change. The most significant dimension of Structure for my program was the emphasis placed on scientific practice. A cognitive-historical account of conceptual change would need to begin by transforming the traditional philosophical understanding of conceptual change as something inherent in languages or ideas into the view that it is something accomplished by human agents.

However, I thought Kuhn’s choice of the psychological “gestalt switch” as a way of characterizing conceptual change, both in the individual and in the community, to be...