Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 March 2012
Among the topics discussed in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, those of education, training, and pedagogy are apt to seem the least compelling. Certainly, the earliest debates about Structure focused on other, more controversial, matters: incommensurability, meaning change, the rationality of theory choice, normal science—the list goes on. Over the past two decades, however, a growing concern among historians and sociologists of science with the nature of scientific apprenticeship has stimulated greater appreciation of the importance of questions of teaching and learning to the philosophical position sketched in Structure. This paper seeks to develop further our understanding of these issues as they bear on Kuhn's theory of science.
1 Cavell, Stanley, “Foreword: An Audience for Philosophy,” in idem, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge, 2002), xxxiiGoogle Scholar.
2 For a summary of these early debates, see Zammito, John H., A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago, 2004), 65–95Google Scholar. Key interventions include Davidson, Donald, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973), 5–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Masterman, Margaret, “The Nature of a Paradigm,” in Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge, 1970), 59–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Karl Popper, “Normal Science and Its Dangers,” in ibid., 51–8; Putnam, Hilary, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scheffler, Israel, Science and Subjectivity (Indianapolis, 1967)Google Scholar; Shapere, Dudley, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Philosophical Review 73/3 (1964), 383–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Meaning and Scientific Change,” in Colodny, Robert, ed., Mind and Cosmos: Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy (Pittsburgh, 1966), 41–85Google Scholar; idem, “The Paradigm Concept,” Science 172 (1971), 706–9.
3 Garcia-Belmar, Antonio, Bertomeu-Sanchez, Jose Ramon, and Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette, “The Power of Didactic Writings: French Chemistry Textbooks of the Nineteenth Century,” in Kaiser, David, ed., Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 219–51Google Scholar; Geison, Gerald L., “Research Schools and New Directions in the Historiography of Science,” Osiris 8 (1993), 226–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Karl Hall, “‘Think Less about Foundations’: A Short Course on Landau and Lifshitz's Course of Theoretical Physics,” in Kaiser, Pedagogy and the Practice of Science, 253–86; Kaiser, David, “Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower, and the Production of American Physicists after World War II,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 33 (2002), 131–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Nuclear Democracy: Political Engagement, Pedagogical Reform, and Particle Physics in Postwar America,” Isis 93 (2002), 229–68; David Kaiser and Andrew Warwick, “Kuhn, Foucault, and the Power of Pedagogy,” in Kaiser, Pedagogy and the Practice of Science, 393–409; David Kaiser, “Introduction: Moving Pedagogy From the Periphery to the Center,” in Kaiser, Pedagogy and the Practice of Science, 1–8; Olesko, Kathryn M., “Physics Instruction in Prussian Secondary Schools before 1859,” Osiris 5 (1989), 94–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Physics as a Calling: Discipline and Practice in the Königsberg Seminar for Physics (Ithaca, 1991); idem, “Tacit Knowledge and School Formation,” Osiris 8 (1993), 16–29; Buhm Soon Park, “In the ‘Context of Pedagogy’: Teaching Strategy and Theory Change in Quantum Chemistry,” in Kaiser, Pedagogy and the Practice of Science, 287–319; Traweek, Sharon, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Cambridge, MA, 1988)Google Scholar; Warwick, Andrew, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 43, 46–7, 57, 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Galison, Peter, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago, 1997), 239–93Google Scholar. Geiger, Roger L., Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Galison, Peter and Hevly, Bruce, eds., Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research (Stanford, CA, 1992)Google Scholar.
6 On the postwar bubble in physics, see Kaiser, David, “The Postwar Suburbanization of American Physics,” American Quarterly 56 (2004), 851–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “The Physics of Spin: Sputnik Politics and American Physicists in the 1950s,” Social Research 73 (2006), 1225–52.
7 Frydl, Kathleen, The GI Bill (Cambridge, 2009), 308Google Scholar.
8 “President's Report,” Official Register of Harvard University 45 (1 Dec. 1948), 13.
9 General Education in a Free Society: Report of the Harvard Committee (Cambridge, MA, 1945). See also Buck, Peter S. and Rosenkrantz, Barbara Gutman, “The Worm in the Core: Science and General Education,” in Mendelsohn, Everett, ed., Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences: Essays in Honor of I. Bernard Cohen (Cambridge, 1984), 371–94Google Scholar; McGrath, Earl James, Science in General Education (Dubuque, IA, 1948)Google Scholar; idem, “Science in General Education,” Scientific Monthly 71 (1950), 118–20.
10 See especially Kaiser, David, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (Chicago, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Cold War Requisitions”; idem, “Postwar Suburbanization.”
11 For a general account of the reaction to Sputnik see Divine, Robert A., The Sputnik Challenge (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Urban, Wayne J., More than Science and Sputnik: The National Defense Education Act of 1958 (Tuscaloosa, 2010)Google Scholar.
12 Clowse, Barbara Barksdale, Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958 (Westport, CT, 1981)Google Scholar.
13 For information on physics and area studies, see Engerman, David C., Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts (New York, 2009)Google Scholar; Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart; idem, “Cold War Requisitions.”
14 Flesch, Rudolf, Why Johnny Can't Read—And What You Can Do about It (New York, 1955)Google Scholar. Smith, Mortimer Brewster, And Madly Teach: A Layman Looks at Public School Education (Chicago, 1949)Google Scholar.
15 On Bruner's work in this period see Bruner, Jerome S., ed., The Process of Education (Cambridge, MA, 1960)Google Scholar; idem, On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand (Cambridge, MA, 1962); idem, Toward a Theory of Instruction (Cambridge, MA, 1966). For Piaget's impact on these debates see Hsueh, Yeh, “Piaget in the United States, 1925–1971,” in Müller, Ulrich, Carpendale, Jeremy I. M. and Smith, Leslie, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Piaget (Cambridge, 2009), 358Google Scholar.
16 Much is made of this connection in Fuller, Steve, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Chicago, 2000)Google Scholar.
17 Kuhn, , “The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research,” in Taylor, Calvin W., ed., The Third (1959) University of Utah Research Conference on the Identification of Creative Scientific Talent (Salt Lake City, 1959), 162–74Google Scholar; idem, “Comment on MacKinnon,” in The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors (Princeton, NJ, 1962), 379–84; idem, “Comment on Siegel,” in ibid., 450–7; idem, “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research,” in Crombie, A. C., ed., Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Technical Invention, From Antiquity to the Present (London, 1963), 347–69Google Scholar.
18 Kaiser, “Introduction,” 2. Kaiser is also characterizing the work of Michael Polanyi, which is obviously not at issue in the present paper.
19 Kuhn, Structure, 43–51.
20 Kuhn, “Essential Tension”; idem, “The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science,” Isis 52 (1961), 161–93.
21 Kuhn, Structure, 44–5.
22 Something like this argument is given in Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, with a Revised English Translation (Malden, MA, 2003), 27–36Google Scholar.
23 Kuhn, Structure, 46.
24 Cederbaum, Daniel Goldman, “Paradigms,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 14 (1983), 173–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Andresen, Jensine, “Crisis and Kuhn,” Isis 90 (1999), S43–S67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baltas, Aristides, Gavroglu, Kostas, and Kindi, Vassiliki, “A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn,” in Conant, James and Haugeland, John, eds., The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with An Autobiographical Interview (Chicago, 2000), 255–9Google Scholar.
26 Baltas, Gavroglu, and Kindi, “A Discussion,” 267–9.
27 Homans, George Caspar, The Society of Fellows, ed. Brinton, Crane (Cambridge, MA, 1959)Google Scholar.
28 Kuhn to Mrs Ivan Fischer, 27 July 1943, box 12, MC240, Papers of Thomas S. Kuhn, Institute Archives, MIT. Hereafter TSKP.
29 Andresen, “Crisis and Kuhn”; Forrester, John, “On Kuhn's Case: Psychoanalysis and the Paradigm,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007), 782–819Google Scholar.
30 Baltas, Gavroglu, and Kindi, “A Discussion” 273.
31 Kuhn, “The Metaphysical Possibilities of Physics,” n.d. (c.1945), box 1, TSKP.
32 Baltas, Gavroglu, and Kindi, “A Discussion,” 272.
33 Kuhn, , “Subjective View: Thomas S. Kuhn on Behalf of the Recent Student, Reflects on the Undergraduate Attitude,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin 48 (1945), 29–30Google Scholar.
34 Kuhn, “Objectives of a General Education Course in the Physical Sciences, May 1947,” May 1947, box 1, TSKP.
35 See also Kuhn's notes on Conant's first iteration of the general education course in the experimental sciences: Kuhn, “Natural Sciences 11(a),” 1947, box 1, TSKP. On the Aristotle epiphany, see Kuhn, “Preface,” in idem, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago, 1977), xi–xii; idem, “What Are Scientific Revolutions?” in The Road since Structure, 16–18.
36 General Education in a Free Society; Conant, James Bryant, On Understanding Science: An Historical Approach (Oxford, 1947)Google Scholar.
37 Kuhn, “Washington University Conference, talk delivered 12 May 1949,” May 12, 1949, box 12, TSKP; idem, “Untitled Talk to Faculty Conference on General Education,” 1951, box 12, TSKP.
38 Kuhn, “The Sciences in the Harvard General Education Program,” n.d. (c.early 1950s), box 12, TSKP.
39 Conant, James Bryant, ed., Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1957)Google Scholar.
40 Conant, James Bryant, ed., “The Overthrow of the Phlogiston Theory: The Chemical Revolution of 1775–1789,” in Harvard Case Histories, 1: 67Google Scholar.
41 I recount the history of the case method at Harvard in detail in Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). For useful discussions of this topic see Galison, Image and Logic, 55–8. Kimball, Bruce A, “Warn Students that I Entertain Heretical Opinions, Which They Are Not to Take as Law”: The Inception of Case Method Teaching in the Classrooms of the Early C. C. Langdell, 1870–1883,” Law and History Review 17 (1999), 57–140CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “The Proliferation of Case Method Teaching in American Law Schools: Mr. Langdell's Emblematic ‘Abomination,’ 1890–1915,” History of Education Quarterly 46 (2006), 192–247.
42 Kuhn, “Can the Layman Know Science?” 13 Dec. 1955, box 12, TSKP.
43 Kuhn, “Untitled Talk.”
44 Richardson, Alan, “‘That Sort of Everyday Image of Logical Positivism’: Thomas Kuhn and the Decline of Logical Empiricist Philosophy of Science,” in Richardson, Alan and Uebel, Thomas, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism (Cambridge, 2007), 346–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
45 Kuhn, “The Book,” n.d. (c. 1948–51), box 1, TSKP, underlining in original.
46 Kuhn to David Owen, 6 Jan. 1951, box 3, TSKP.
47 Kuhn, “Introduction: Textbook Science and Creative Science,” 1951, box 3, TSKP.
48 Kuhn, “Notes & Ideas,” 1949, box 1, TSKP.
49 Kuhn, “Introduction.”
50 Kuhn to Philipp Frank, n.d. (c. 1952, letter unsent), box 25, TSKP.
51 Kuhn to Charles Morris, 31 July 1953, box 25, TSKP.
52 Kuhn, “Penultimate draft of Structure, before June 1960,” 1960, box 4, TSKP.
53 Ibid.
54 Kuhn, Structure, 23.
55 Janik, Allan, “Impure Reason Vindicated,” in Pichler, Alois and Säätelä, Simo, eds., Wittgenstein: The Philosopher and His Works (Working Papers from the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, No. 17) (Bergen, 2005), 263–80Google Scholar.