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Scientific Revolutions
 First published Thu Mar 5, 2009
The topic of scientific revolutions has become philosophically important, especially sinceThomas Kuhn's account in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1962, 1970). It iscontroversial whether there have been any revolutions in the strictly Kuhnian sense. It is alsocontroversial what exactly a Kuhnian revolution is, or would be. Many analysts agree that therehave been revolutionary scientific developments of various kinds, whether Kuhnian or not, butthere is considerable disagreement about their import. For the existence and nature of scientificrevolutions is a topic that raises a host of fundamental questions about the sciences and how tointerpret them, a topic that intersects most of the major issues that have concerned philosophersof science and their colleagues in neighboring science studies disciplines such as history of science and sociology of science. Even if the so-called Scientific Revolution from Copernicus to Newton fits the attractive, Enlightenment picture of the transition from feudalism to modernity (aclaim that is also contested), the putative revolutions in mature sciences (e.g., the relativity andquantum mechanical revolutions) challenge precisely this Enlightenment vision of rational,objective sciences and technologies leading society steadily along the path of progress towardthe truth about the world. Although many philosophers and philosophically or historicallyreflective scientists had commented on the dramatic developments in twentieth-century physics,it was not until Kuhn that such developments seemed so epistemologically and ontologicallydamaging as to seriously challenge traditional conceptions of science—and hence our understanding of knowledge acquisition in general. Why it was Kuhn's work and its timing thatmade the major difference are themselves interesting questions for investigation, especially giventhat others (e.g., Wittgenstein, Fleck, Polanyi, Toulmin, and Hanson) had already broachedimportant “Kuhnian” themes.Was there a Scientific Revolution that replaced pre-scientific thinking about nature and societyand thus marked the transition to modernity? Which later developments, if any, are trulyrevolutionary? Are attributions of revolution usually a sign of insufficient historiographicunderstanding? In any case, how are such episodes to be explained historically andepistemologically? Are they historical accidents, perhaps avoidable; or are they somehownecessary—and, if so, why, and necessary for what? Is there an overall pattern of scientificdevelopment? If so, is it basically one of creative displacement, as Kuhn originally claimed? Doall revolutions have the same structure and function, or are there diverse forms of rupture,discontinuity, or rapid change in science? Do they represent great leaps forward or, on thecontrary, does their existence undercut the claim that science progresses? Does the existence of revolutions in mature sciences support a postmodern or “post-critical” (Polanyi) rather than amodern, neo-Enlightenment conception of science in relation to other human enterprises? Doestheir existence support a strongly constructivist versus a realist conception of scientificknowledge claims? Are they rational or irrational? Do they invite epistemological relativism?What are the implications of revolution for science policy?
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1. The Problems of Revolution and Innovative Change
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2. History of the Concept of Scientific Revolution
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2.1 Scientific Revolution as a Topic for Historiography of Science
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2.2 Scientific Revolution as a Topic for Philosophy
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2.3 Criteria for Identifying Scientific Revolutions
 
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3. Kuhn's Account of Scientific Revolutions
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3.1 Paradigms and Normal Science
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3.2 Crisis and Revolution
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3.3 Incommensurability
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3.4 Progress through Revolutions
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3.5 Issues in Interpreting Kuhn
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4. Responses to Kuhn's Account
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4.1 Incommensurability revisited
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5. Larger Formations and Historical A Prioris: The Germanic and French Traditions
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5.1 Thomas Kuhn: Kantian or Hegelian?
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5.2 The German Neo-Kantian Tradition
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5.3 The French Discontinuity Theorists
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5.4 Kuhn's Relation to the Germanic and French Traditions
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5.5 Hacking's Historical Ontology
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6. Alternative Conceptions of Scientific Change
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6.1 Nonlinear Dynamics
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6.2 Biological Cases
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6.3 Some Alternative Conceptions of Scientific Revolution
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6.4 The Parallel with Innovation in Economics
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7. Revolution or Evolution?
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8. Conclusion
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Bibliography
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Other Internet Resources
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Related Entries
1. The Problems of Revolution and Innovative Change
The difficulties in identifying and conceptualizing scientific revolutions involve many of thehardest issues in epistemology, methodology, ontology, philosophy of language, and even valuetheory. Since revolution obviously involves significant change, we right away confront the problem of deep, possibly noncumulative, conceptual change, now in modern science itself, alocus that Enlightenment thinkers would have found surprising. And since revolution is typicallydriven by new results, sometimes completely unanticipated, we also confront the hard problemof understanding creative innovation. Third, major revolutions supposedly alter the normativelandscape of research by altering the goals and methodological standards of the enterprise, so weface also the difficult problem of relating descriptive claims to normative claims and practices,and changes in the former to changes in the latter.
 
Comparing the world of business and economic theory provides a perspective on the difficulty of these problems, for both the sciences and business technologies change rapidly and sometimesdeeply, thanks to what might be termed “innovation pressure”—both the pressure to innovate andthe pressure to accommodate innovation (e.g., Christensen 1997; Christensen and Raynor, 2003; Nickles 2008a). In a market economy, as in science, there is a premium on change driven byinnovation. Yet most economists have treated innovation as an exogenous factor—as a sort of accidental, economically contingent event that comes in from outside the economic system towork its effects. It is surprising that innovation has not been a central topic of economic theorists,especially theorists of capitalism, which, according to the Austrian-American economist JosephSchumpeter, follows a pattern of “creative destruction.” Schumpeter himself did identifyeconomic innovation asthe process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantlyrevolutionizes the economic structure
 from within
, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantlycreating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.[1942, chap. VII; Schumpeter's emphasis]Unfortunately, subsequent economic theorists (with a few exceptions such as Robert Solow,Brian Arthur, and Paul Romer) did not develop Schumpeter's insight. The result is an inability of major economic theories to explain economic change. The parallel observation holds for  philosophy of science. Here, too, the leading philosophers of science until the 1960s—the logicalempiricists and the Popperians—neglected, nay shunned, innovation as a legitimate topic, eventhough it is the primary intellectual driver of scientific change. They distinguished “context of discovery” (the context in which new ideas and practices are developed) from “context of  justification” (the logical structure of testing and confirmation of claims already available), or,more broadly, the
 process
of ongoing scientific work from the logical structure of its final
 products
. (For recent discussion of this distinction, see Schickore and Steinle 2006.) By contrast,Thomas Kuhn attempted to explain the tempo and mode of what he took to be the creative-destructive pattern of scientific change precisely by internalizing innovative processes into his philosophy of science (see §3 below). He rejected standard accounts of both discovery and justification.What are the root conceptions of revolution? At bottom there would seem to be three, sometimesoverlapping tropes, all involving rapid change from one stage or phase or structured system toanother: (1) revolution as simply turning, e.g. revolving; (2) revolution as overturning; and (3)revolution as a great leap forward into new, previously uncharted territory. We may subdivideeach in various ways, principally these. (1) The turning may be either revolution as in a turningwheel or a turning away from one path or direction to another. And the turning away may beeither slight (doing something new that was previously imaginable, in which case it is hardlyrevolutionary) or sharp (doing something previously quite unexpected, even inconceivable). Thehistory of both science and philosophy is full of such turns. (2) The overturning can be either with or without replacement. In the former case, the replacement can be either a turn away fromthe past toward an imagined future or a return to a (supposed) past, overlapping trope (1). If thereis no replacement, the field is presumably left in disarray. (3) The leap forward can be either arapid but continuous, “evolutionary” development or so momentous as to constitute a sharp break with the past but nevertheless progressive, that is, a kind of extension of an existingenterprise into new intellectual or practical terrain. In either case such a development can betransformative, opening up—or creating—a whole new domain of possibilities. In the case of thesciences and technologies and other problem-solving endeavors, this can involve the introductionof novel kinds of entities, processes, problems to investigate, and tools of investigation. In each
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