Group Think

How do scientists think?

The short answer: very much like you or me.

If that statement doesn’t raise any eyebrows today, it’s because of a college professor named Thomas Kuhn who died in 1996.

Fifty years ago he wrote a book titled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Never heard of it? You should have. It changed history by changing the way we think about science and scientists.

Fifty years ago, before the rise of environmentalism, before anyone felt guilty about Hiroshima, before anyone had heard of DDT, Chernobyl, or Bhopal, science and scientists could do no wrong.

A DuPont advertising slogan declared: “Better Living Through Chemistry.”

Most people had a blind faith that science was a superior form of knowledge. Scientists were lab-coated seers, the embodiment of reason and systematic, disinterested analysis. Researchers who used the scientific method of experiment and inductive logic were believed to be impartial founts of wisdom.

Then Kuhn’s Structure was published. Science’s reputation hasn’t been the same since.

Kuhn’s book was no page-turner, but it reportedly sold 1.4 million copies, a remarkable statistic for a text written for college students and other academics.

How often the book was used as a course text is impossible to calculate. I remember reading it in three separate undergraduate courses.

Despite the book’s title, most of Kuhn’s book was taken up, not with scientific revolutions, but with what scientists did between revolutions and how scientists psychologically dealt with developments in their discipline.

According to Kuhn, it all hinged on paradigms. In fact, thanks to Kuhn, the word “paradigm” became fashionable.

Paradigm was a perfectly good word in the English language before Kuhn. The only trouble was hardly anyone ever used it.

After Kuhn it seemed to be on everyone’s lips, even if they didn’t know exactly what it meant. For Kuhn; paradigm was roughly the same as gestalt, meaning an integral pattern of practices and assumptions which governed a community at any particular time.

Significantly, he argued that between revolutions paradigms ruled scientists’ minds. Scientists, according to Kuhn, do not think empirically, advancing from one experimentally proven fact to another as they built an edifice of knowledge piece by piece. Their thinking was dominated by broad, sweeping paradigms they shared with their fellow scientists. These paradigms enabled them to ask questions and make sense of their observations and findings, but made them cognitively incapable of accepting a different paradigm.

Paradigms, to Kuhn, created resistance to change in the history of science. A scientific revolution—the Copernican or Darwinian, for example—only occurred when so much evidence had accumulated that the existing paradigm crumbled and was replaced by a new one.

Kuhn’s brilliant theory was that the history of science was not linear. It changed discontinuously, as all paradigms eventually crashed and burned. The whole notion of science getting steadily closer to the truth about nature was thrown open to question.

Why was this viewpoint significant? Because it punctured the myth that scientists were a class apart, people who faithfully followed a systematic, disciplined method of thinking.

At least one reason why Kuhn’s Structure became so well-known was that it tapped into the zeitgeist of the 1960s. At a time when so many other cultural institutions were under attack, it was understandable that people were receptive to an argument which basically knocked scientists off their pedestal.

Though he was never comfortable about his theory’s implications for scientists and their mode of thinking, Kuhn helped to de-mystify science. In the annals of unintended consequences, his book stands out as a milestone not only in the history of science, but also in the history of how human beings think about nature.