III. Scientists Deconstructing Science: The Poetic Imagination of ‘Objectivity’ (Part 2)
2. Thomas Kuhn: Paradigm Shifts and the Priority of Worldview
If Polanyi is responsible for laying the foundation of a new understanding of science, Thomas Kuhn must be recognized as the most influential voice to extend and articulate this new understanding of the nature of scientific progress and inquiry. Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions exploded onto the contemporary scene in 1962. As David Naugle puts the matter, ”The damage reports or victory pronouncements, depending on your perspective, are still coming in. Kuhn’s concept of scientific revolutions as paradigm shifts has been remarkably influential (as well as controversial), being nothing less than a frontal attack on the traditional understanding of the authority, rationality and indeed the very nature of modern science.”[1]
It should be noted from the outset that Kuhn seems to be implicitly dependent on Polanyi’s work for much of his articulation of the nature of science, particularly Polanyi’s development of the role of tradition and community in scientific understanding and practice.[2] Kuhn however goes on to describe at greater length the nature of scientific discovery, exploring how scientific revolutions actually take place in the history of science. Contrary to the standard assumption of modern science that scientific discovery consists in the steady accumulation of data, Kuhn argues powerfully that scientific discoveries emerge through the shifting of paradigms or worldviews.[3] Scientific discovery takes place through one paradigm overtaking another as the dominant scientific way of looking at the world. Throughout his treatment Kuhn extensively traces this phenomenon historically through examining scientific revolutions such as the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics and the shift from Aristotelian theories of motion to Galileo to Copernicus. This phenomenon is entirely contrary to the ‘science as accumulation’ view. As Kuhn points out, “Cumulative acquisition of unanticipated novelties proves to be an almost non-existent exception to the rule of scientific development. The man who takes historic fact seriously must suspect that science does not tend toward the ideal that our image of cumulativeness has suggested.” [4]
Over-against the standard view of science as the progressive accumulation of knowledge, Kuhn shows through both historical and philosophical argument that scientific advancements take place through the ascendance of new paradigms of scientific inquiry, which recognize inherent anomalies and crises in the previous paradigm and offer new and preferable prospects for scientific inquiry if adopted. “Confronted with anomaly or with crisis, scientists take a different attitude toward existing paradigms, and the nature of their research changes accordingly.”[5]
Moreover, paradigms are not simply ways of interpreting the world according to Kuhn, but function much more as lenses through which the scientist observes the world. “Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses. Confronting the same constellation of objects as before and knowing that he does so, he nevertheless finds them transformed through and through in many of their details.”[6] Thus, paradigms do not function actively so much as tacitly (Kuhn borrows Polanyi’s phrase on this point[7]). Paradigms are not ways of interpreting so much as ways of seeing. Interpretation is a central aspect of exploring a paradigm, but it is not technically possible to interpret a paradigm. The interpretive enterprise is key,
But the interpretive enterprise…can only articulate a paradigm, not correct
it. Paradigms are not corrigible by modern science at all. Instead,
as we have already seen, normal science ultimately leads only to the recognition
of anomalies and to crises. And these are terminated, not by deliberation
and interpretation, but by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the
gestalt switch. Scientists then often speak of the ‘scales falling from
the eyes’ or of ‘the lightning flash’ that ‘inundates’ a previously obscure
puzzle, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time
permits its solution.[8]
Thus, Kuhn argues that scientific revolutions are not the result of objective reasoning and rationally adjudicating between different pieces of data, but rather the ascendancy of new paradigms that come to prominence through the conversion of scientists from the old paradigms to the new. The vocabulary of conversion is central for Kuhn (and for the Christian!). “The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced”[9] declares Kuhn. “Conversions will occur a few at a time until, after the last holdouts have died, the whole profession will again be practicing under a single, but now different, paradigm.”[10] The fact that scientific discovery and knowledge is ultimately dependent not on objective data, but on paradigms through which all data is seen means that faith has primacy in all knowing. This faith is necessary because long established and largely functional paradigms are difficult things to dispense with. The scientist must “have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed in a few. As decision of that kind can only be made on faith.”[11]
It is important to note that for Kuhn this faith is not groundless. Rather it is grounded in the conviction of the scientist that the new paradigm has good hope of being the one that best views reality, having both personal and aesthetic appeal.[12] However, ultimately the faith of scientists in the new paradigm is best established through the faithful and fruitful scientific life and practice that emerges in the scientific communities committed to the new paradigm. The acceptance of a new paradigm cannot of course be based on empirical facts or rational reasons because paradigms that govern how facts and reasons are seen and understood are prior to any rational or empirical investigation. Thus paradigms can ultimately be accepted only on faith that is grounded in the personal, aesthetic and conceptual appeal of the paradigm and whether or not it is persuasively articulated and embodied by the scientific communities already practicing the paradigm. There are clearly significant continuities between this understanding of paradigm-conversion and the Christian understanding of conversion and entrance into the Christian community.
In the end, it seems impossible to avoid the force of Kuhn’s argument. The fact of paradigms that at least partially determine how we see and understand the world is almost unanimously undeniable in contemorary philosophy and theology. For those that fear that Kuhn’s argument will lead to relativism and antirealism, there are numerous ways to avoid such implications while recognizing the force of Kuhn’s case. This is especially possible when Kuhn’s dependence on the work of Polanyi is recognized. Polanyi’s commitment to both the situatedness of the scientist and the reality of a genuinely “other” reality that is engaged with in the process of knowing undergirds a reading of Kuhn’s doctrine of the paradigm that is able to avoid such difficulties. In contrast to the reading of Kuhn’s doctrine of paradigms as incommensurable, relative, arational and antirealist, a properly theological reading of Kuhn will yield an understanding of paradigms that is better termed as semi-commensurable, situated, supra-rational and eschatologically realist.
3. Conclusion: The Hermeneutic of Scientific Faith
At this point is should be clear that Polanyi and Kuhn offer much in the way of revolutionizing theological approaches to science. Both substantially refute the notion that science is an objective, disinterested, non-ideological discipline that holds a monopoly on facts. In contrast to such a modernist conception of science, Polanyi and Kuhn show that science is ultimately an intersubjective and situated discipline which is embodied in a community of practitioners bound by a common faith and sustained by a tradition.[15] Moreover, in addition to being an intersubjective, fiduciary, communal, and tradition-mediated discipline, science is also governed by presupposed paradigms (worldviews) which determine the nature of scientific inquiry and discovery.
In light of this understanding of science the standard evangelical responses to science must be reevaluated. The practice of seeking to show that Christian belief could conform to scientific reasoning was based on the conception of science as objective and disinterested that Polanyi and Kuhn have refuted. Such approaches ultimately are both theologically and scientifically bankrupt in that they are unable to account for the distinctive and in many cases incommensurate presuppositions of theology and science. In order to move beyond such approaches, it is necessary to return to the resources of Christian theology itself to see what resources it offers to facilitating a proper response to the challenge of science. It is to that task that I turn now.
[1] Naugle, Worldview, 196.
[2] See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd Ed., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 191-198; see also Alasdair MacIntyre’s explication of the relationship between Polanyi and Kuhn in “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and Philosophy of Science,” in Why Narrative?: Readings in Narrative Theology, Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones, eds. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 138-157. MacIntyre makes some fascinating criticisms of Kuhn’s view of scientific revolutions in that it does not sufficiently account for the narrative dimension of human rationality and inquiry. Such a criticism is, I think well founded. However, it does not diminish the substantial contribution of Kuhn’s notion of the paradigm.
[3] See Kuhn, Structure, 94-97.
[4] Kuhn, Structure, 96.
[5] Kuhn, Structure, 90.
[6] Kuhn, Structure, 122.
[7] See Kuhn, Structure, 191-198; see also Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966).
[8] Kuhn, Structure, 122.
[9] Kuhn, Structure, 151.
[10] Kuhn, Structure, 152.
[11] Kuhn, Structure, 158. One cannot help thinking here of the Jesus’ metaphor of new wine and new wineskins (Matt. 9:17).
[12] See Kuhn, Structure, 158-198.
[13] Naugle, Worldview, 205.
[14] See Kuhn, Structure, 205-207.
[15] MacIntyre would add that science presupposes a particular narrative identity as well. See above, n. 42.
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