To my entry on “The Enduring Influence of Thomas Kuhn”, Michael Bérubé emailed to set things straight, or at least set them more on course. Below is our exchange. From various online encyclopedias and such, I've taken the liberty of adding hyperlinks to the correspondence:

To: Dave L
From: Michael Bérubé
Date: 4/13/05, 11:34 pm

Oh brother. Please read Kuhn's 1970 postscript to the book before dismissing it as "relativist." And read it carefully.

Your remark, "The book fails of course, because certain scientific theories in fact do latch on to the mechanics of reality better than others" doesn't even begin to address the questions at stake -- let alone Kuhn's point that "theories, of course, do 'fit the facts,' but only by transforming previously accessible information into facts that, for the preceding paradigm, had not existed at all." Neither Karl Popper nor Imre Lakatos-- among Kuhn's most salient critics-- subscribed to anything so simplistic as you've offered here.

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To: Michael Bérubé
From: Dave L
Date: 4/14/05, 9:22 AM

Whether he wants to admit it or not, Kuhn's position ultimately boils down to relativism. One either acknowledges this or one doesn't. If one does acknowledge it and still believes it's a feasible position to hold, then there is nothing I can say that will sway you otherwise. If you don't believe Kuhn's position is tantamount to relativism, then there is room to argue on whether or not Kuhn is relativist.

In the end, relativism has a long and undistinguished history. The litany of arguments proffered against modern forms of relativism (Rorty, Derrida, Foucault, ad infinitum) has been made countless times and there's no utility in me reproducing them here. (See W. H. Newton-Smith, Hilary Putnam, etc.).

Let's take Kuhn's proposition that you posted, that "theories, of course, do 'fit the facts,' but only by transforming previously accessible information into facts that, for the preceding paradigm, had not existed at all."

By its very form, this proposition is absurd. Kuhn undermines the very notion of a paradigm shift -- the notion of incommensurability -- that was the entire point of originality in his thesis. That 'facts' in one so-called paradigm can be introduced, and presumably recognized, in a second so-called paradigm is ipso facto proof that the two paradigms are not in fact very different at all, but operate under shared concepts of reason, logic, meaning, truth, and the like. The entire crux of Kuhn's book (and Feyerabend's in more outrageous form) is to assert that different paradigms are incommensurable. Otherwise, what is the usefulness of the term 'paradigm'? If you look up the definition of 'incommensurability' there is very little room for fudging its definition.

The very holistic picture of science is an incoherent exercise. Why else do you think Kuhn's book is among the most cited in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index?

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To: Dave L
From: Michael Bérubé
Date: 4/14/05, 4:45 PM

Dave,

OK, you're right, the brief Kuhn snippet I offered in comments doesn't solve the question of just how theories fit the facts. But I do think that the discoveries of oxygen and X-rays-- and, for that matter, the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965-- make Kuhn's case pretty well: the phenomena themselves do not dictate the ways in which they will be seen, and indeed you need to be working within a coherent paradigm in order to see them as phenomena at all. And the reason he's really not a relativist is that he does, finally, believe that some new paradigms address (and resolve) anomalies better than others (whereas Feyerabend is just over the edge-- we're agreed about that much).

Now, about incommensurability. Yeah, Kuhn is too dogmatic about this, and too readily inclined to think that guys just have to die before their paradigms vanish from the earth. Of course, sometimes this is true-- old scientists can get really blinkered and dogmatic, and go to their graves pledging allegiance to phlogiston or phrenology. But sometimes it does happen that people get persuaded of the plausibility of a new paradigm before they die, and not because of any rock-kicking on anybody's part, either: look how string theory has come back from the dead in the past ten years after being widely dismissed. It's certainly not because anyone has found any strings. So clearly there must be plenty of commensurability out there amid the incommensurabilities, or at least potential overlap between paradigms: even if party A believes in a point theory of space and party B believes in strings, there are procedures (repeatability of experiment, internal coherence of mathematical proof, or appeals to broader meta- questions like whether the sub-Planck length anomalies really need "addressing" at all) that might persuade A of the cogency of B's belief or vice versa.

As for Kuhn's influence in the humanities: as I argue in the final few pages of my essay on Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser (available somewhere on my site), mostly baleful and/or misunderstood. We're way too eager to declare a conflict incommensurable, punch out, and go home-- and, to make matters worse, we don't even have a decent account of how paradigms produce anomalies. In fact, we tend to skip over that aspect of Kuhn altogether. (But Kuhn wouldn't be the first guy who had his work watered down in translation-- Godel, Heisenberg, white courtesy phone please.) Then again, sometimes there really are honest-to-God incommensurabilites out there. In the world of politics, I would say that the conflict between liberal democracy and fundamentalist Islam is one of 'em.

Anyway, the only reason I bothered you about this was that your post on me presumed way too much. OK, I get it, you're one of those guys who reaches for his wallet (or his gun!) when you hear "Kuhn," but seriously, I named his book and Faulkner's because they're the books that had the most influence on me as a young'un, and I've read them so often. If I were thrust into Fahrenheit 451 tomorrow, I could probably quote whole passages by heart-- regardless of whether I believed every word.

Regards,

Michael

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To: Michael Bérubé
From: Dave L
Date: 4/16/05, 10:22 AM

Michael,

Given the qualifications you’ve raised surrounding both Kuhn and his disproportionate impact on the humanities, while we’ll probably always disagree on Kuhn’s significance (and perhaps ‘what Kuhn means’ culturally), it sounds like I presumed too much with respect to your own Kuhnian influence. I’ll check out your essay on Fish. I’ve always found him to be way out in Feyerabend-land.

I’m used to reading English folk (the discipline, not the country) cite Kuhn lovingly, construing him as a real life scientist who gives the thumbs up for an ‘anything goes’ love-in. And you’re right: I’m someone who goes nuts when I see Kuhn’s name in the cultural limelight, even vis-à-vis a simple passing reference from a blogger. Seeing a ‘pro-Kuhn’ sentiment on your blog (a blog that is getting pretty huge nowadays) had me pulling what little hair I have left in my head out.

I used to be a pomo junkie in a past life: Kuhn, Rorty, and Foucault were my fixes and Nietzsche was my hero. I’ve since come to reject the Continental philosophical approach entirely and absolutely cringe at some of the things I used to say and believe. Hence the passionate impatience with which I now pipe up when it comes to Kuhn et al. (Freud would probably have a field day with me.)

We seem to agree on the deplorable ways in which Godel, Heisenberg, and Einstein for that matter have been kitsched-up for various pop-relativisms. (The cultural significance of the Sokal hoax cannot be underestimated in this regard.)

In the end, I think Kuhn gives too short shrift to science’s cumulative effect, a metaphor yes but one of the limned surfaces of a minimalist, fuzzy realism. The concept of ‘truth’ is, qua Kant (and Tarski), a normative concept. ‘Truth’ and its circular band of brothers (reference, meaning) is presupposed in the very act of human perception, let alone the evaluative practice of theory adjudication. W. Newton-Smith’s “Relativism and the Possibility of Interpretation” in Rationality and Relativism (ed. Hollis & Lukes) is an outstanding summary of what may be the only tenable position.

I also agree with you that incommensurability has definite applicability in the social sciences, namely because human intentionality is the elephant in the room. The unique philosophical dilemmas introduced by Geisteswissenschaften are, I believe, legitimate insofar as the phenomena of free will and determinism are themselves incommensurable. In the social sciences, the expectations and directness of cause and effect are much less apparent, much farther removed, much more laden with layers of meaning, than they are in Naturwissenschaft. I just don’t believe that incommensurability exists in the physical sciences, the world of tables, chairs, quarks, and strings.

Best,
Dave

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To: Dave L

From: Michael Bérubé

Date: 4/17/05, 10:07 AM

Dave--

Definitely don't lose any more hair on my account. Sloppy readings of Kuhn are all over the place, but then, sloppy readings of everyone are all over the place. The important point (I think) is that there's a difference between relativism and the kind of thing you're talking about. Neither Kuhn nor Rorty thinks that our current practices (scientific or social) are no more valid than alchemy or trial by ordeal-- both of them are unambiguous about the fact that what we've got now is better than what we had then. The only thing they deny-- though it's a big thing-- is that we are moving toward some antecedent, preordained goal. It's always seemed to me that they were simply taking Darwin's anti-teleological argument seriously: yes, life forms have evolved, but they're not evolving toward anything. Some people believe this, some don't. Life goes on. Similarly with "truth"-- you seem to think it's synonymous with reference and meaning, I think it's a matter (and not a simple or blithe one) of establishing protocols for determining what is in fact the case (with regard to science) or for how best for humans to behave (with regard to the social). I don't think it's a good idea to think of moral or political truths the way the "realists" do, i.e., as a matter of "discovering" truths we do not yet know. But where I part ways with Rorty et al. is when it comes to quarks and such, where I don't see the harm in thinking that we're getting closer to understanding how these things actually work. Quarks antedate us, whereas moral and political truths don't.

Anyway, good luck with your blog--

Best,

Michael