Kuhn and Scientific Practices

Thomas Kuhn’s philosophical work has helped initiate or reinvigorate many of the central themes in the philosophy of science over the past three decades. His claim that appropriate attention to history could decisively transform familiar philosophical views of science was of course prophetic. His discussion of meaning change, incommensurability, and the interdependence of theory and observation occasioned both the rise of rationalist metamethodologies and the renewal of scientific realism. Constructivist sociologies of science and various social epistemologies also trace a lineage to Kuhn’s discussion of normal science and the role of scientific communities in sustaining research traditions. The striking growth of philosophies of the special sciences was perhaps foreshadowed as well by Kuhn’s reflections on the “ramshackle structure” of normal science, in contrast to familiar presumptions of the theoretical unity of the sciences. ² Yet in my view, one of the most philosophically far-reaching themes of his work has yet to receive adequate recognition. Even now, thirty-five years after the appearance of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the significance of Kuhn’s shift of philosophical focus from scientific knowledge to scientific practices has not yet been fully assimilated. ³

The difficulty of recognizing Kuhn’s turn to practices does not stem entirely from epistemological tunnel vision, however. The turn to scientific practices pervades almost every aspect of his work, but nowhere does he reflect upon this theme explicitly. Any discussion of Kuhn on scientific practices must therefore begin by showing how Kuhn’s own familiar writings are reconfigured by recognition of his central concern with this theme. Since I have discussed these interpretive issues extensively elsewhere, I shall take them up only in the opening section. ⁴ In the remainder of the paper, I shall address two further questions. The first is prompted by the proliferation of practice talk in philosophy and social theory since the time of Structure. In the light of this subsequent work, we can now ask what is distinctive about Kuhn’s discussion of scientific research as a kind of practice. The second question stems from Kuhn’s return late in his career to the issues raised by incommensurability and scientific revolutions, and especially from his reflections upon changes in scientific “lexicons” as a way to construe the incommensurability of competing research traditions. Having started by reading Kuhn’s work in terms of a shift to a philosophy of scientific practice, how should we then interpret and assess his late work on changes in lexical structure?

I

Most philosophers of science, both before and after Kuhn, have been primarily concerned with the structure and justification of scientific knowledge, and this concern has shaped philosophical interpretations of and responses to Kuhn. I shall not here rehearse these familiar readings of Kuhn as a philosopher who emphasizes the role of theoretical, instrumental, and evaluative presuppositions in reconfiguring observed evidence and preventing the neutral assessment of competing paradigms. Instead, I shall highlight some distinctive features of his work when it is reinterpreted as a philosophy of scientific practices.

Kuhn began by discussing “normal science,” a distinctive way of organizing the activity of scientific research. Normal science is the practice of scientists who know their way around in a shared research field. They have a practical grasp of the objects they are dealing with, and the conceptual and material tools at hand to work with those objects. They understand what is a significant question in their field, and generally agree about which questions have been successfully answered. These prior achievements also provide a sense of what would count as an adequate answer to presently unsolved puzzles, and indeed, the practical mastery of these achievements provides the basis for their subsequent work.

Kuhn describes these paradigmatic achievements as “accepted examples of actual scientific practice which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together.” ⁵ Those familiar with the logical empiricist tradition might say that Kuhn thereby takes “bridge principles” or “correspondence rules” to be more fundamental than the theories they supposedly interpret. ⁶ A crucial part of his point, however, is that we must distinguish paradigms from explicit principles or rules. Grasping a...