50th Anniversary of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas Kuhn

The book challenged the traditional view of scientific progress as accumulation, replacing it by an alternative view of science as consisting of periods of normal science interrupted by scientific revolutions. Scientific revolutions change the rules and standards of scientific practice, and even change the criteria of what is regarded as a scientific problem. The book itself caused a revolution in the philosophy and history of science, and had a lasting influence on other fields, like the social studies of science. The keywords of the book, like "paradigm", "normal science" and "scientific revolution", have found their way into almost every academic discipline. Structure is one of the most quoted academic books regardless of discipline, and its influence reaches far outside Academia. Former Vice President Al Gore characterized it as one of the most influential books of the last century, and when Kuhn died in 1996 The New York Times credited him with making the term "paradigm" a part of everyday language.

On this occasion the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities and the Program in the History of Science, University of Bergen, organized a one-day conference. In addition to the historical context and the historical significance of the book, the conference focused on some of its controversial aspects. It is an amazing fact that these aspects are almost equally controversial today. For example, from the very beginning some critics argued that Kuhn did not distinguish adequately between the descriptive and the normative elements of his theory, and even made normative inferences from factual descriptions. Other critics alleged that his thesis of incommensurability necessarily implies relativism, even irrationalism. Others again argued that his monolithic view of normal science is erroneous, and overlooks the diversity of science. We had four distinguished scholars to discuss these questions.

About the speakers
Lorraine Daston is director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and professor at the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. She has published on, among other subjects, the history of probability and statistics (Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, 1998), wonders in early modern science (Wonders and the order of nature : 1150 – 1750, 1998 – with Katharine Park), and the history of scientific objectivity (Objectivity, 2007 - with Peter Galison). Her most recent book is Histories of scientific observation (2011 - ed. with Elizabeth Lunbeck).

Evelyn Fox Keller is professor emerita of History and Philosophy of Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research focuses on the history and philosophy of modern biology, especially on genetics and its language, and on gender and science. Keller is the author of a biography of the geneticist and Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock (A Feeling for the Organism,1983) and of The Century of the Gene (2000) which traces the history of genetics in the 20th century. Her most recent book is The mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture (2010).

Paul Hoyningen-Huene is professor for Theoretical Philosophy and General Philosophy of Science and Founding Director of the Center for Philosophy and Ethics of Science, Leibniz University of Hannover. Originally a theoretical physicist, he became a philosopher of science with particular interest in the work of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. Among others he has published the book Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science (1993), (German orig. 1989), with a forword by Kuhn, and he has published some of Feyerabend's letters to Kuhn. He has just finished the manuscript of the book Systematicity: The Nature of Science, where he argues, as the title indicates, that the distiguishing mark of scientific knowledge is its systematic nature.

Jerome Ravetz is an independent philosopher of science. He is well known for his early book Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (1971). In 1990 he published Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy with Silvio Funtowicz, on the management of uncertainty and quality, and in the following years they pioneered the field of Post-Normal Science (a term that alludes to Kuhn's "normal science"). His most recent book is No-Nonsense Guide to Science (2006). He is now concerned with "paleo-normal science" and the contemporary pseudo-mathematical social sciences.