4/11/2005 08:53:00 PM|||Dave|||To the rhetorical question “You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?”, Berube writes: “The Sound and the Fury. Honorable mention, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions…”

Oh brother. It should come as no surprise that Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) has been the most cited 20th century book in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, not (I might add) within the scientific community itself. Within philosophy of science, Kuhn’s book has not held up very well (although it is Screamin’ Al Gore’s favorite book, if that’s any consolation.) Why is this? Because it’s relativism, and relativism hasn’t passed the smell test of logic since Protagarus. In the end, Kuhn’s central thesis of “incommensurability” is incoherent. (In order for one to even perceive two competing paradigms as existing presumes an objective perspective from which to ‘size up’ the respective paradigms.) Even Kuhn distanced himself from the book as years passed.

Yet Kuhn, like Rorty and Foucault and Derrida and …, remain as popular as ever among non-scientific, idealistic, humanities types. This in no small measure due to Kuhn's book trying to de-prioritize the vantage point of science when compared to say, religion, superstition, literary, or any number of other ‘perspectives’. The book fails of course, because certain scientific theories in fact do latch on to the mechanics of reality better than others. While no theory can ever be said to be ‘absolutely true’ (Popper), we can say that theory A (gravity is a force that causes the ball to drop) is less false than theory B (the green Martian under my bed causes the ball to drop).

Observing an intellectual with strong pomo proclivities, such as Berube, place The Structure of Scientific Revolutions at the top of their desert island list reveals quite a bit about said intellectual, alluding to the alarmingly widespread, naïve belief that the world can be made as one wills it rather than as it is. If we use contemporary academia as a barometer, the 'two cultures' that C.P. Snow wrote about appear as wide as ever.

Update (4/17/05): For an extended exchange on Kuhn between Berube and myself, see this followup entry, "The Enduring Influence of Thomas Kuhn - Pt. II".|||111326737731909715|||The Enduring Influence of Thomas Kuhn