Kuhn , Naturalism , and the Social Study of Science

(September 7, 2012) I have argued that the Kuhn of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions promotes a naturalistic study of science. The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge is also seen by many of its proponents as a naturalistic approach to science, and as such may be seen as part of the Kuhnian legacy. Nonetheless, I argue that it has been an inadequate successor to Kuhn. In particular, its emphasis on externalist explanations of scientific change are inconsistent with Kuhn’s model of scientific development. A more faithful and fruitful heir to Kuhn’s legacy is the cohort of psychological and cognitive studies into scientific reasoning as based on exemplars and their like. 1 Naturalism in the work of Thomas Kuhn One of the most interesting features of Thomas Kuhn’s work in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is its naturalism. From a philosophical point of view, this naturalism was highly original, sufficiently original that it was not properly understood, either by critics or by many supporters of Kuhn’s work. Quine (1969) famously proposed methodological naturalism as an approach to epistemology, seven years after the publication of the first edition of Structure, and only just before the publication of the second edition, in which a postscript clarified some of the more important naturalistic elements of the book. It is no wonder that Kuhn said of his notion of exemplar (the central application of the concept paradigm), that this is the ‘most novel and least understood aspect of [Structure]’ (Kuhn 1970: 187). There are two strands to Kuhn’s naturalism. The first concerns his use of history. Structure contains a lot of history. But it is not a historical work in a straightforward way (as is his 1978 Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912). Rather, Kuhn uses historical examples to generate a general account of the (structure of) the historical development of science, an account that has a significant social element. This in turn he puts to philosophical use, fulfilling