The First Fifty Years of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in Mainland China

Three years after Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was first published in 1962, Chinese readers became aware of this book via a book review. After the academic silence caused by the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), the first complete Chinese translation of Structure was published in Shanghai in 1980. Since being introduced to the mainland, Kuhn’s work has had a significant and lasting influence on the philosophy and history of science, and on the humanities and social sciences as well.

1 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the Introduction of Its Ideas

In 1965, a translator with the pseudonym Yaohui 耀辉 translated physicist David Bohm’s 1964 book review of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for Digest of Foreign Social Sciences (现代外国哲学社会科学文摘). This was the first mention of Kuhn’s book in a Chinese journal. The first Chinese translation of the book itself was by Li Baoheng 李宝恒 and Ji Shuli 纪树立 in 1980; the second was by Suh-Der Tsen 程樹德, Daiwie Fu 傅大為, Daw-hwan Wang 王道還, and Sechin Yeong-Shyang Chien 錢永祥 in 1994; the third was by Fei Chao 费超 in 2000; and the fourth was by Jin Wulun 金吾伦 and Hu Xinhe 胡新和 in 2003.

Kuhn and Structure became a hot target for introduction and interpretation when the first Chinese translation of his book was published. In 1978, World Philosophy 哲 学译丛 published an article translated from excerpts of the postscript of the 1975 Russian version of Structure. That article approved of Kuhn’s ideas but also pointed out that “the issue of the interaction between science and society and the influence of social factors on the logical structure of knowledge was excluded in his idea” (Mikulinski and Markova 1978: 73). That same year, Yang Tong 杨童 published a paper on Kuhn and his paradigm thought. Between 1980, when the first Chinese edition was published, and 1985, almost thirty papers were published in Chinese on Kuhn and Structure. In 1988, Ji Shuli 纪树立 translated and published Kuhn’s 1986 paper “Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product.” During the 1990s some sixty to seventy papers were published in mainland China introducing and studying Kuhn’s ideas. By 2003, when the fifth Chinese translation of Structure appeared, the number of Chinese publications on Kuhn exceeded two hundred.

The 1980 Chinese translation of Structure was followed in 1981 by the Chinese translation of Kuhn’s Essential Tension (1977) and, in 2004, its revised edition (Kuhn 1970). In 2003, Kuhn’s Copernican Revolution (revised edition, 1985; originally published in 1957) was translated into Chinese, and in 2012 Kuhn’s Road since Structure (2000). Jin Wulun published his Thomas Kuhn in Taiwan in 1994, and Ziauddin Sardar’s 2000 Thomas Kuhn and the Science Wars appeared in Chinese in 2005.

The translators of Structure have different interpretations of this book. For instance, the key term paradigm is variously translated as fanli 范例, dianfan 典范, the transliteration paladaimu 帕拉代姆, guifan 规范, fanxing 范型,or fanshi 范式. Sun Xiaochun 孙小淳 (2003) compared and commented on the first, second, and fourth translations (since he did not notice the third one). Scholars in Taiwan prefer dianfan, while those on the mainland prefer fanshi and fanxing nowadays.

2 Philosophy of Science: From Popper to Kuhn

Logical positivism and Karl Popper were very popular on the mainland during the 1980s. Popper’s ideas on science impressed Chinese readers during the ten-year Cultural Revolution and helped them break out of the stubborn system of earlier years. The influence of Structure was not so obvious, though its first translated version was published in 1980. Kuhn’s view of science is a reaction against the hegemony of logical positivism and falsificationism. At the beginning of the Reform Era (1976–89), the mainland still had not experienced the shock of logical positivism and falsificationism, so the influence of Kuhn was not as pronounced as that of Popper.

Closely aligned with the trend of thought at that time, Popper’s falsificationism became a theoretical tool for Chinese to express their political feelings and dreams. At that time, Structure was just a representation of “an especially interesting view of science” (Shen 1981). But with the popularization of...