Kuhn's Legacy by Mladenovic Bojana;

Author:Mladenovic, Bojana;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

Revolutionary Changes as Rationally Warranted

How could Kuhn account for revolutionary change as rationally warranted if the proponents of rival paradigms differ in their very understanding and employment of all scientific evaluative criteria? This question has always been the firmest foothold for relativistic readings of Kuhn, but it was always equally clear that he saw scientific revolutions as rationally warranted.

Kuhn did not think of scientific revolutions as swift and complete changes. Incommensurability between rival paradigms is always partial and developed over a long period of time during which an overlapping series of facts and values remains relatively stable. Historically, the new paradigm comes into being by a series of gradual transformations of the old paradigm’s concepts and principles.25 At any point in time, the old paradigm and the new paradigm have many empirical, normative, and conceptual features in common.

The new paradigm is motivated by the anomalies that it deems irresolvable within the framework of the old paradigm. It proposes resolution of the anomalies by reconceptualizing the entire framework. Discontinuity is thus obvious, but continuity is present in equal measure. The old paradigm’s anomalies and achievements make the new paradigm historically possible: to reconceptualize, the new paradigm must use the old concepts and focus on at least some of the old paradigm’s problems. Should the new paradigm win the struggle, it will recover even more of the old paradigm’s successes.

Revolutions thus may appear to be swift, decisive, and complete only from a considerable historical distance, which Kuhn adopted in Structure. He made clear in his later writings that he understood the actual unfolding of scientific revolutions as slow, incremental, and partial.

Thus, to evaluate scientific revolutions as rationally warranted, we need not appeal to the criteria of rationality external to science: collective rationality will suffice. Members of a scientific community propose, debate, and effect the change, offering reasons that are—as a condition of the members’ remaining respectable community members—internal to science and recognized by other members as carrying some weight. Of course, according to Kuhn, the reasons are not decisive: they incline rather than compel. They may sometimes persuade those who initially favored a rival solution, but not always and certainly not on pains of irrationality.26

To appreciate this point is to appreciate both the nature and the limits of Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality as a form of collective rationality. The common set of publicly shared values, beliefs, methods, and so on makes persuasive arguments possible. Persuasion is enough: it is not indoctrination, trickery, manipulation, or force. Persuasion is not a form of negotiation either. Negotiation, irrespective of the outcome, typically leaves one’s views and wishes intact; persuasion changes them by relying on reasons that one shares with one’s interlocutor. Of course, persuasive reasons abound on both sides during the periods of revolutionary science. They do not always convince everyone, but they do sharpen and refine the scientific debate of the period. Scientific rationality as collective rationality requires that all of the offered reasons be internal to science—in other words, to be to some degree recognized as having legitimacy by proponents of both paradigms.

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