Book Review-The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

One of my reading committee members recommended this book to me as I was getting his signature for my thesis. He knew my interest in the philosophy of science and told me that I HAD to read this book because it makes clear how scientific advancements evolve along with the process of scientific discoveries.  Not long after that encounter, I bought the book with the greatest of intentions.

It sat in a prominent place in my bookshelf for years. It travelled with me across the country from job to job, city to city. It was always on my To Be Read list and prominent in my psyche. I finally got around to sit down to reading it as I entered the latter part of my engineering career. In some ways, I thought that since I was participating in the evolving scientific process as an engineer, I was creating the structure of the scientific revolution. It wasn’t until after I became more experienced that I sensed the rhythm of the evolution of science and engineering that I realized that this book should have been read long ago. It was also during that period that I became aware that the structure that Kuhn describes happens to everything that goes through both evolutionary and revolutionary changes, which is just about everything.

As Kuhn lays out the steps of his structure, emphasizes that the step to a revolution is benignly unspectacular, until the exceptions to the rule stack up, where our scientific dogmas from accumulated historical perceptions are increasing violated by reality. Kuhn takes a fine scalpel to our accepted beliefs that make up the normal sciences. Kuhn terms these accepted beliefs paradigms. They are more than just beliefs however; these are conjectures and derived knowledge that had been determined to be true through empirical verification. Kuhn is very careful with his argument, as a practiced philosopher does. He steps through his structure in fine granularity, and he tries to anticipate objections, using salient scientific history of ideas to illustrate his assertions. This is not just a philosophical treatise but also a review of scientific history that frames his structure, most notably the Copernican revolution as compared to the Ptolemaic ideas. One hundred and seventy-three pages devoted to outlining his structure, but mostly to convince the reader, through examples and logic, that this structure is not just a whimsical edifice, fragile and delicate. Instead, Kuhn worked diligently to convince the reader of the reality of the structure.

The ubiquity of Kuhn’s idea is something that took me by surprise. This is proof that he has been successful in convincing the world of his idea. As I was reading the book, my thoughts were not: this is revolutionary. My thoughts were: of course, that is the way it has always been and should be. Which proved to me that Kuhn’s ideas were such common sense that no one had objected to his proposal, or that Kuhn’s ideas had been so seamlessly integrated into our perspectives that it has been tightly woven into how we perceive scientific ideas. The phrase “paradigm shift”  has so seamlessly been appropriated into our vocabulary that it is an anchor phrase when discussing changing long held beliefs; it is so accepted that many humorously and sarcastically skewers the uninformed user of the term.

Most importantly, Kuhn’s phrases: normal science, anomalies that challenge the paradigm, and the revolutionary overthrow of paradigms are deeply ingrained in our psyche when we think of revolutionary changes in the sciences. It is so ingrained that as I was reading the book I found myself asking: what’s the big deal? But it is a big deal, it formalizes how scientists and technologists abstract the methodologies of their field to create more accurate explanations which are truer to what reality is showing us.

Yet, as I was reading the book, I find myself marveling at the breadths and depths of Kuhn’s explications. He sought not only to convince the scientists, but the philosophers and historians.

I read the Enlarged Second edition of Kuhn’s book. It included an extensive Postscript at the end of the book. The original book was published in 1962, the Second edition was published in 1970. It is somewhat surprising that a treatise such as this would get a second edition so quickly, it indicates that the content of the book is considered to be important enough and had elicited sufficient interest to warrant the second edition. The postscript by Kuhn is his opportunity to address his critics and clarify what he thought needed to be clarified. It is an interesting juxtaposition of his thoughts, a scant eight years apart.

Since the second edition, the third and fourth editions has been published, in 1996 and 2012. The 2012 edition is a celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the book’s publication. Since Thomas S. Kuhn passed away, I suspect that the additions to the fourth edition involve commentaries on the historical significance of Kuhn’s work, there is also a 2020 edition but does not seem to indicate it is a new edition.

I am happy that I finally read this book, a book that can be said to have laid out a framework of scientific advancement in the 20^th century and still have an impact on scientific advancements in the 21st century. It was not an easy read, I read it chapter by chapter, took copious amounts of notes — trying to capture the essence of the abstractions, and then tried to summarize Kuhn’s thoughts in my own words in order to gain better understanding of the powerful ideas.