Fuller, a historian and
philosopher of science and now professor of sociology, University of Warwick,
has written a book mostly about Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, a workthat he characterizes as "probably the
best-known academic book…. [and] one of the most influential books of the
second half the twentieth century, and arguably the one that has done the most
to shape both academic and public perceptions of science" (1, 379).
However, Fuller’s Kuhn is not an introduction to Structure (he
summarizes the book on page 2 in one paragraph); rather, he means to explore
the variety of contexts and backgrounds that produced Structure
and the influential impact that it has had on a variety of disciplines and
readerships, to give an "account of the curious origin and even more
curious reception of Structure" (33), a work that has fascinated
him since his undergraduate years in the 1970s at Columbia University.

Structure
is commonly seen as having a major liberating impact on a wide and diverse
spectrum of disciplines (including the natural and social sciences, science and
technology studies, the sociology of scientific knowledge, and philosophy),
freeing disciplines from restrictive, repressive positivist illusions and
requirements, overturning "inappropriate methodological standards"
(3), negating positivist hubris, legitimizing pluralism, and encouraging each
discipline to develop its own autonomous approaches, practices, criteria.
Fuller presents a dissenting view and critique intended to demonstrate that Structure   had just the opposite effect, ending up
abetting all sorts of mostly nefarious reactionary, ideological, repressive,
depoliticising, conservative, antihumanistic policies, practices, attitudes.
Furthermore, while Structure is also widely regarded as groundbreaking,
creative, an original work of considerable scholarship, Fuller argues that
actually it is a pedestrian, mediocre, shallow, ambiguous, evasive, and in some
ways shoddy piece of work. He claims that its fame and success were a matter of
fortuitous timing, that its ideas had already been very much in the air, and
that Kuhn was a minor, unoriginal intellect, "probably the least
prominent of the group of thinkers who are usually said to have advanced
similar views of science" (5). Fuller says that Kuhn led "from the
middle" rather than from the forefront (5), opportunistically capitalizing
on the work of others and on being in the right place at the right time. In an
intriguing metaphor he likens Kuhn’s work and its disproportionately strong
impact to the strange, unwitting, comic, almost bizarre circumstances
surrounding the awed, projecting (in the psychodynamic sense) reception of
cryptic, gnomic, but essentially simplistic pronouncements made by Chauncey (or
"Chance") the simple-minded gardener, the chief protagonist (played
by Peter Sellers) of the motion picture "Being There".

Fuller thus weaves a
strand comprising extended backgroundconsiderations ranging from Plato
to James Bryant Conant’s General Education in Science program at Harvard (the
latter plays a prominent role in Fuller’s analysis) and lengthy discussions
concerning Structure ‘s undesirable impact on the natural and social sciences,
on the sociology of science, on the philosophy of science, on policy decision
makers, and on the general readership. This long, highly detailed work bristles
with multifaceted arguments and discussions supporting its theses concerning Structure.
It includes lengthy, often painfully detailed and copiously annotated elaborate
discourse on all sorts of historical, philosophical, political, educational,
and economic topics.

Fuller points out that
another way of seeing Kuhn is as a study pertaining to two types of
"irrationality and reason": 1) the revolutionary position that views
reason as "critical, libertarian, risk seeking" and, correspondingly,
irrationality as inhibiting, repressive opposition to that revolutionary and
critical stance; and 2) the conservatively "foundational, authoritarian,
and risk averse" position that views reason as that which justifies and
supports current practices (the ongoing "paradigm") and,
correspondingly, irrationality as criticisms of accepted practices, and
iconoclastic advocacy of change. Fuller says Kuhn is "effectively
an account of the second track written from the standpoint of the first"
(38-39).

To support his elaborate
theses about Structure ‘s origins and impact, Fuller develops a variety
of intricate and complicated set of interlocking and partially overlapping
conceptual tools, the chief being 1) the notion of the "Double Truth
Doctrine" (a double coding strategy whose origins are traceable to Plato
and Pythagoras: a dual rhetorical structuring of history that makes critical
narratives seem innocuous and nonthreatening to the "rabble" while simultaneously
covertly telling the accurate, disruptive, threatening, revolutionary story to
the elites); 2) the abovementioned two classes of irrationality/reason;
3)  Whig, Tory, and Prig
worldviews;  4) positivism versus
historicism; 5) instrumentalism against realism (the former represented in
physics by Ernst Mach, the latter by Max Planck); 6) an "iconographic turn
in the history of science", and 7) the distinction between
"paradigm" and "movement".

After deploying these and
other, minor conceptual tools to explicate and support his theses (this takes
up most of the book), Fuller concludes with a brief proposal for
"overcoming" or "getting over"  Kuhn. His proposal, couched in terms of the last mentioned
contrasting pair (paradigm against movement), is to invert the major dogma of Structure,
the premise that what is what characterizes the history of science, and what is
highly desirable and valuable, are long stretches of peaceful, stable,
autonomous, paradigm-controlled "normal" science during which a
discipline is protected from destabilizing internal and external criticism.
This ideal, peaceful state is interrupted only when intolerable internal crises
("mounting anomalies") have precipitated brief
"revolutions" which in turn lead to another era governed and
protected by new stabilizing paradigm. Not only does Fuller claim that this
pattern is a seriously flawed, distorted representation of science’s history;
he also advocates adopting the opposite policy.  He proposes that the desirable, usual state ought to be a
revolutionary condition, an era of unstable flux in which a movement
(roughly, an ideology-driven cause) is prominently, deliberately and visibly at
work, a climate where sciences are unfettered, activist, contentious, openly
proselytizing, fluid, creative, productive, forward-looking, radically
evolving. On this inversion of Kuhn, the paradigm becomes  "nothing more than an arrested
social movement" (402), an inhibiting template of orthodoxy that
represses the desirable progressive, revolutionary potentials of movements that
are trying to gain adherents.

Fuller’s elaborate,
detailed, multifaceted, multidisciplinary interweaving of theses and conceptual
ingredients in Kuhn is one reason why this massive book of 400-plus
pages is next to impossible to abstract, but not the only one. Its discourse
often is elusive. I found Kuhn extraordinarily difficult to read, much
of the time feeling vaguely disoriented, lost, at sea, frustrated. Several editorial
reviews on Amazon’s web site for Kuhn had similar reactions. For
example, the Library Journal’s reviewer called the book "very
scholarly but overly abstruse"; the Scientific American review
describes it as "a heavily footnoted and almost impenetrably dense
insider’s account".  Some customer
reviews expressed similar sentiments.

Why, or how, does Kuhn
produce this experience of impenetrableness? After all, its ideas and concepts
are not particularly difficult to understand. I’ve come to believe that there
are multiple and interacting reasons. One is that its narrative often comprises
a sequence of sentences whose individual and cumulative meanings are obscure
because the language is highly general and abstract. In such passages the
effect is unsettling and disorienting. One stumbles along, struggling to
discern the implication of each generality and of the section as a whole,
trying to identify the point that (one assumes) is being made and its relevance
to the book’s principal theses. A second class of problematic segments are
those comprising a concatenation of brief sentences that each just state some
bare, concrete historical datum (a few names, dates, events). Again, it is
difficult to identify the point of each sentence and to see how they connect
with one another, and, again, one feels vaguely lost. A third type of
problematic, baffling discourse that occurs frequently is the (usually quite
extended) highly detailed, closely referenced digression into peripheral
historical, scientific, political, or philosophical matters. When reading such
sections one wonders why the long side trip is needed, how it is relevant, and,
often, even what its point is.

A common element in all
three of these types of problematic discourse is that each unsettles and loses
the reader. The ubiquitousness of this experience while reading Kuhn raises
the suspicion that the author is not sufficiently careful with the reader, too
self-absorbed, indifferent to the reader’s needs, unaware of difficulties his
discourse might be raising and oblivious to the possibility that the reader
might need help. Indeed, at times I suspected that there simply was no argument
being developed, that, say, in a side excursion Fuller simply was soliloquizing
about a topic that interested him, elaborating on matters that at best had only
distant, tenuous relationship to the exploration of Structure.

Another criticism I have,
one unrelated to the kinds of impediments discussed above, is that in some
significant ways the book is out of balance. I mean that on the one hand,
numerous relatively minor, peripheral matters are discussed at length and in
considerable detail, while on the other hand, discussions of some important
aspects of Fuller’s principal theses are slighted. Their explorations tend to
be brief (especially when compared to the long asides about secondary matters),
often reduced to matter-of-fact dogmatic statements. An example is his
discussion of Kuhn’s use of the double truth strategy in Structure. His
scattered observations, although numerous, seem to leave many important and
obvious core questions about this subject unanswered, even unaddressed. Fuller
does remark on some of the ways in which Structure achieves and
implements this encoding strategy, does opine (but with some ambiguity) about
whether Kuhn used it deliberately, does report how various disciplines
presumably misread the book’s true messages. Still, I feel that Fuller does not
do justice to this rich issue that plays such a central role in Kuhn; he
mainly reports rather than explores. For example, it never became clear to me just
what the covert message in Structure intended for the "elites"
was; what did Kuhn "really" mean to say in Structure, to whom
(to which elites), and why? And, was there some group of readers, some
profession, that actually understood, acknowledged that "real"
message, or was Kuhn’s entire readership (except for Fuller and a few of his
colleagues) taken in by the bogus surface messages? Or: What were the deeper
motivations (i.e., those beyond the obvious and superficial ones mentioned in Kuhn)
that seduced the "rabble" into misreading Structure?  Or: Where did Kuhn himself stand on this
matter of the double truth doctrine, really? What did his many disclaimers of
his reader’s (mis)interpretations mean? As I noted, Fuller does touch on these
and related matters to some degree, but much more could and should be said
about a topic that is so central to Kuhn and to Fuller’s conception and
critique of Structure.

Another important example
of a lack of proportion in Kuhn is Fuller’s handling of his proposal to
"overcome" Kuhn. A proposal to turn the main position of a book one
is criticizing (here, Structure) on its head does not seem like a
trivial matter; it therefore seems reasonable to expect that it would receive a
comprehensive treatment. Yet, Fuller takes only a few pages (roughly, 399-408)
to outline and comment on it. His presentation is brief and leaves much unsaid
and unasked. He does not, for example, consider the expectable kinds of
defensive negative reactions that such a proposal would raise among the
orthodoxy, nor how one might cope with such negative or even hostile reactions.
He also fails to explore, or even to ask, how one could bring about or
facilitate the radical changes he advocates. Surely such questions and issues
ought to have been asked and explored if Fuller really is serious about his
proposal.

In sum, I conclude first,
that the main points of Kuhn are often overwhelmed and obscured by
dense, long digressions and/or lack of clear intent and direction of the
discourse; and second, that his core theses merit more extended, deeper
exploration (the balance problem). Still, the book certainly is
informative, my criticisms notwithstanding; I did learn a lot reading it. Was
it worth the significant effort, and would Kuhn be of interest to others?
For the scholar or specialists in science and technology studies, I suppose the
book could repay the laborious and massive work required to unpack it.
(Although it is not only the main body of Kuhn that makes great demands
on serious researchers; they also would be obliged to pursue the huge number of
detailed, often quite lengthy footnotes and associated very large number of
references [covering 36 pages].) I doubt that many would be willing to expend
such a massive effort. But, as noted, even a limited, less scholarly reading
such as mine can yield some benefits.

Having said that, I for
one would not read this book unless there was a compelling reason, at least not
as a first foray into its principal subject matter. I believe that there are
better options for gaining some awareness of and appreciation for this
material. Referring to his 1992 paper, "Being There with Thomas Kuhn: A
Parable for Postmodern Times" (History and Theory 31: 241-275,
1991), Fuller says that this earlier essay "presented the core thesis of
the book before you" (xii). I found that paper readable and informative,
and for most it might obviate the need to tackle Kuhn directly. Another
viable alternative is Ziauddin Sardar’s excellent and very short Thomas Kuhn
and the Science Wars (Totem books, 2000). Or, as Fuller also suggests,
readers wanting to avoid his "overlapping accounts…. [wanting] a more
straightforward account of the circuitous route on which they are about to
embark [in Kuhn] should turn to chapter 8, section 1" (32). What I
really would like to see, however, is a book that has not yet been written: an
exegesis of Kuhn that would be a major overhaul of Kuhn, that
would make available a more focused, reader-friendly, coherent, connected,
accessible version of Fuller’s (unnecessarily) difficult, diffuse, dense work
while retaining the essence of the informative, evocative, provocative ideas
immanent in this potentially valuable but elusive book. 

                                               

 

© 2003 Louis S. Berger

 

Louis S. Berger‘s
career has straddled clinical psychology, engineering and applied physics, and
music. His major interest is in clinical psychoanalysis and related
philosophical issues. Dr. Berger’s publications include 3 books (Introductory
Statistics, 1981; Psychoanalytic
Theory and Clinical Relevance, 1985; Substance
Abuse as Symptom, 1991) and several dozen journal articles and book
reviews.  His book Psychotherapy As
Praxis was reviewed in Metapsychology in January 2003.

Categories: Philosophical