Abstract
By linking the conceptual and social dynamics of change in science, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions proved tremendously fruitful for research in science studies. But Kuhn’s idea of incommensurability provoked strong criticism from philosophers of science. In this essay I show how Raimo Tuomela’s Philosophy of Sociality illuminates and strengthens Kuhn’s model of scientific change. After recalling the central features and problems of Kuhn’s model, I introduce Tuomela’s approach. I then show (a) how Tuomela’s conception of group ethos aligns with Kuhn’s notion of paradigms as group commitments, and (b) how Tuomela’s distinction between I-mode and we-mode forms of collective intentionality can capture the shifting paradigmatic commitments in Kuhn’s model of change as a cycle of normal and revolutionary science. But Tuomela’s analysis does not rely on meaning holism, and thus does not involve the problematic notion of incommensurability that burdened Kuhn’s analysis.
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Notes
Increasingly emphasizing language, Kuhn came to regard the wide sense of incommensurability as an “overextension” (2000, 60 note 4, 298, resp.; also 57; 65ff).
Kuhn admits his account of persuasion is “very partial and impressionistic” (1996, 152).
The clearest statement of this turn is in his 1970 paper, “Reflections on My Critics,” where he avows a sociological approach, simultaneously explanatory and prescriptive, to good science as the outcome of a group choice (Kuhn 2000, 130–131; also Kuhn 1996, 152–153, 158–159; Hoyningen-Huene 1993, 239–245).
As a normative framework, the paradigm’s lexicon supplies the concepts for “articulating both problems and their solution”; and its exemplars sanction the “identification of new research problems” and provide “implicit standards for the acceptability of candidate problem solutions” (Hoyningen-Huene 1993, 159, 160f, 162, resp).
For game-theoretic arguments supporting the we-mode, see Hakli et al. (2010).
More complex individualistic models such as Bratman (2009), which involve interlocking intentions and meshing subplans, only heighten the difficulties for explaining the impersonal authority of discipline-wide standards.
“Public willingness to let the ethos stand” paraphrases Gilbert; in using this phrase I leave open a technical dispute regarding the role of public expression in collective acceptance: whether publicity grounds a commitment to the ethos conditional on others’ commitment (Gilbert) or rather, grounds presuppositions one makes for a categorical commitment (Tuomela); see Tuomela (2007, 85–92); Gilbert (1989, 289).
E.g., Ziman (1969, 65f); Fleck (1979, 45, 110f); an example is the dinosaur-extinction controversy, provoked by a team of physicists who challenged a paradigmatic gradualist assumption in geology and paleontology regarding earth history (Alvarez 1997); CIA suggests the physicists were less constrained by a geological we-mode belief.
E.g., disagreements over norms of unbiased statistical analysis (see Staley 2002).
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Acknowledgments
For feedback on earlier versions of this paper, I thank Raimo Tuomela, members of the Georgetown University Philosophy Department, participants at the 2009 Philosophy of Social Sciences Roundtable, and two anonymous reviewers.
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Rehg, W. The Social Authority of Paradigms as Group Commitments: Rehabilitating Kuhn with Recent Social Philosophy. Topoi 32, 21–31 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-012-9138-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-012-9138-7