Kuhn's Case for the Irrationality of Scientific Revolutions

Introduction: Science as a Non-Accumulative Enterprise

"Communities in this sense exist, of course, at numerous levels. The most global is the community of all natural scientists."

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

To understand Thomas Kuhn's ideas regarding scientific revolutions, one must first grasp his broader perspective on the history of science. Kuhn's view is that scientific knowledge is not accumulative — he did not perceive the accumulation of knowledge as linear. Thus, before Kuhn explains the irrationality of scientific revolutions, he establishes the irrationality of the historical picture of science in general.

This paper contends that scientific revolutions are irrational because science itself is irrational. As demonstrated by Kuhn and other authors, there is no specific logic governing why some theories and paradigms become popular while others do not. To paraphrase Kuhn, it is often whoever presented the better argument — rather than whoever had the superior argument — who became popular and gained support.¹ Kuhn further observes that all scientific theories are empirically successful yet ultimately proven false. Thus, both the nature of scientific theory and the rise of popular theories are irrational. How, then, could scientific revolutions be otherwise?

This paper supports the view that Kuhn's work argues scientific revolutions are partially irrational in nature, necessary to scientific development, and — like all revolutions — carry political, economic, and cultural implications. Change and revolution are radical, and they often spring from emotional, psychological, or ethical conflicts of interest. When human emotions, psychology, and ethics are involved, rationality frequently takes a backseat to irrationality. The paper supplies Kuhn's reasons for thinking that shifts in scientific thought are not wholly rational, and argues that his reasoning effectively demonstrates how those shifts violate standard codes of rationality.

Scientific Revolution and Political Revolution

Kuhn compares the nature of scientific revolution to that of political revolution, commenting on the power of crisis to jumpstart change in either realm:

Political revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created. In much the same way, scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way. In both political and scientific development the sense of malfunction that can lead to crisis is prerequisite to revolution.²

Scientific revolutions are comparable to — and in some respects a kind of — political revolution. They fight against the established order or paradigm that no longer serves the scientific community for one or more reasons. There is a similar sense of uprising and build-up of tension in both political and scientific revolutions. Inefficiencies in scientific theories lead to malfunction; malfunction leads to crisis; and crises cause stress, anxiety, tension, and irrationality that may ultimately lead to revolution.

Revolutions, regardless of variety — social, economic, political, cultural, or scientific — may have sources and effects that are not wholly rational. Kuhn continues his comparison, further cementing the idea that scientific revolutions share the character of political ones:

Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favor of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all. Initially it is crisis alone that attenuates the role of political institutions as we have already seen it attenuate the role of paradigms. In increasing numbers individuals become increasingly estranged from political life and behave more and more eccentrically within it. Then, as the crisis deepens, many of these individuals commit themselves to some concrete proposal for the reconstruction of society in a new institutional framework. At that point the society is divided into competing camps or parties, one seeking to defend the old institutional constellation, the others seeking to institute some new one. And, once that polarization has occurred, political recourse fails.³

References

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Bird, Alexander. "Thomas Kuhn." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), 2011. Accessed March 14, 2012.

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Kuhn, T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second Edition, Enlarged. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. The University of Chicago Press, London, 1970.

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