Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Developments of History and Philosophy of Science and Science and Technology Studies in Taiwan: A Short Story

Although Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was first published in 1962, its entries to Taiwan are rather late and curious. Taiwan’s martial law rule was long (thirty-eight years) and lifted only in 1987; thus, her academic and intellectual ecologies are naturally quite different before and after that. This short account first describes Taiwan’s intellectual environment before Structure’s entries. Then it considers the intellectual and social changes immediately after the publication of Structure’s Taiwan translation in 1985, which would constitute Taiwan’s first development of a field known as history and philosophy of science (HPS), along with related fields like Foucauldian and feminist research. The third part of this essay briefly describes an expanded constellation of academic disciplines grown from the intellectual soil before the end of twentieth century, plus the new governance of science and society initiated from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education, which together push forward an active development of Taiwan’s contemporary STS.

The stories of philosophical resistance and criticisms of Kuhn’s Structure from the 1960s to the 1980s in the English-speaking world are familiar enough. But the general situation in East Asia, and Taiwan in particular, are interestingly different. While traditions of analytic philosophy and logical positivism/empiricism were relatively new but firmly established in the post–World War II United States, they were brand-new and very small in postwar Pax-Americana East Asia. The dominance of Kuomintang (KMT) nationalists and their ideologies in postwar Taiwan was challenged in the 1950s only by a small number of postcolonial Taiwan intellectuals and liberal-minded mainlanders, which include an important logical positivist philosopher, Yin Hai-Guang 殷海光 (Fu 1988b). Of course, the opposition was tragically crushed, and as a consequence, logical positivism was considered subversive to KMT, since it was Professor Yin’s major intellectual weapon in criticizing the right-wing totalitarian government. Besides, the anti-metaphysics nature of logical positivism was anyway foreign to Taiwan’s traditional Chinese and European continental philosophies, which were more congenial to KMT ideologies, and it was easy to provoke hostilities from the latter. In short, we had a weak postwar tradition of analytic philosophy, wounded but open to potential allies.

It is then not surprising to find that there were relatively few translations of important works in logical positivism or empiricism, with only one exception: Bertrand Russell, the favorite of Professor Yin. In addition to fragments of logical positivism translated by Yin himself, we had a few of Rudolf Carnap’s papers and his Intellectual Autobiography translated together in 1971. Carnap’s Philosophical Foundation of Physics was also translated in 1970 (two editions). Fragments of Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies were translated and published in a journal by 1972. About Russell, a series of small books were translated by the publisher Cheng-Wen 正 文around 1970, such as The Scientific Outlook (two editions), Lectures on Philosophy and Scientific Knowledge (two editions), Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and the likes. By and large, however, these books are introductory essays, and few major works were translated. Another indication of the extent of circulation of US philosophy of science in Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s can be seen from the number of “cheap” pirate prints of English books circulated in small numbers.¹ Only among these books were more classics of philosophy of science conspicuously listed and publicly circulated. A relevant sampling of book titles² is not difficult to find among private libraries.

Structure’s other front line, the history of science in the United States, seems to be more friendly. Although there was a quite different history and “history of science” in Taiwan, the situation was, however, similar. The term history in Taiwan in the 1950s to 1970s basically means Chinese history, and history of science means Chinese history of science, Needham style. While Joseph Needham’s positivistic historiography deserves credit for anti-Eurocentrism, it was somewhat translated into, or thrown back to, a nationalist historiography in both Taiwan and China (Fu 1993). Thus...