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  • Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in East Asia, Expanded
  • Marta Hanson

What began as a simple question, in conversation with Ben Elman this past May, about when Kuhn’s Structure was translated into Chinese and by whom, has turned into a complex historiography of the history and philosophy of science in East Asia. Not only has Kuhn’s work shaped in part the development of the history of science, the philosophy of science, and STS disciplines in East Asia, but also East Asian scholars have been personally engaged with Kuhn throughout his career, influencing the revision of Structure as much as being influenced in turn by him (see esp. Nakayama 2007: 49–53). Indeed, as historians of science in the United States and Europe gather essays for a fifty-year retrospective about Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,1 historians of science across East Asia are doing the same.2 [End Page 561]

Because the essays in this special section of EASTS on Structure at fifty focus on East Asian scholars’ engagement with Kuhn’s Structure in Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan, they not only expand knowledge of Kuhn’s influence globally beyond US and European academia but also develop further the even less known historiography of the history and philosophy of science as academic disciplines in East Asia. The interaction between Kuhn and historians and philosophers of science in East Asia has been so important over the past half-century in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, in fact, that no single author could likely do justice to the phenomenon.3 Therefore, in this essay I focus on just the translations and translators of Kuhn’s Structure in East Asia, leaving its more complex history within each region to my colleagues. The earliest translations were published first in Japan (1971), then in China (1980) and Korea (1980 and Korea (1981), and finally in Taiwan (1985).

Nakayama Shigeru, one of Kuhn’s PhD graduate students at Harvard in the mid-1950s and later a close colleague, was the first to translate Kuhn’s Structure into an East Asian language in the late 1960s. In 2007, he wrote about how he perceived Kuhn’s response to criticisms of philosophers of science during that time (Nakayama 2007: 49). Nakayama even suggested to Kuhn that he end the controversy by writing a response to their criticisms as a postscript to his Japanese translation of Structure (Kuhn 1971). Although Nakayama had completed a translation before 1968 based on the first edition, he waited for this postscript and meanwhile made changes to his translation as Kuhn proposed them.4 Thus, the famous “Postscript—1969” (Kuhn 1970)5 and even some revisions in the second edition of Structure were closely related to discussions between Kuhn and Nakayama over the Japanese translation that finally appeared in 1971. Through this translation and Nakayama’s later scholarship, Kuhn became influential in the history of science in Japan. Kuhn’s Structure offered a non-Eurocentric approach to science, the concept of “normal science” that worked for scientific practice in the West as well as in East Asia, and the paradigm concept, which opened up research on the mutually constitutive basis of scientific communities and scientific knowledge (what Nakayama [2007: 5] refers to as “scientific community determinism”).

Also in 1969, Nathan Sivin published the article “Cosmos and Computation,” which was to my knowledge the earliest response to Kuhn’s notion of scientific revolutions from the perspective of a historian of Chinese science. In the concluding section, “The Demise of the Cosmos” (64–69), about a revolution in Chinese mathematical astronomy, Sivin argued: “The demand for precision had to win out, once it had been maneuvered into conflict with the goal of metaphysical consistency and unity” (67). When looking back on his essay in 1995, Sivin wrote: “There is a deeper point to this essay that is not mentioned in the Abstract. It is about a scientific revolution, a transformation in the central questions of a science and what constitutes an answer to them. That is what the new indifference to cosmology amounted to. No one had found a revolution in Chinese science because no one had gone...

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