Psychologists have forgotten what paradigms are
The Confusions of Amnesia
Paradigm, What a concept!
“Thank you, Professor Kuhn, for telling us about paradigms. Now that we know about them, we can get rid of them.” – Berkeley[1] students to Professor Kuhn.
“While I cannot say that psychology is a science, I do not wish to deny psychologists the title of scientists.” - Letter from Kuhn to me.
The concept of the paradigm has been floating around in psychology venues lately[2], but it’s become unmoored from the context in which T. S. Kuhn proposed it, becoming a vaporous, insignificant shade of itself. It no longer inflames, a sad fate, because it was once incendiary. For some thinkers, Kuhnian science was everything science should not be. For others, Kuhn’s proposals promised liberation. By denying that vaunted science was a path to truth, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions provided radicals with a passage toward Foucauldian notions of insidious cultural power trapping humans in inescapable webs of unexamined social power.
In the academy, psychology has been, and remains, the field most affected by philosophy of science and judgments about what science is and is not. The first philosophy of science, Auguste Comte’s positivism, pointedly excluded psychology from scientific status, giving psychology a permanent case of status anxiety. As a result, its theories and methods have been molded by the dicta of philosophers of science. That did not change after Kuhn’s Structure. Instead, he reported, they decided some paradigm needed to be invented and enforced by the narrow, conservative training methods Kuhn found in natural science. No wonder some scientists came to ask, “Should the history of science should be rated X?”[3]
I lived through the Kuhnian Methodenstreit, as an undergraduate and graduate student in psychology from 1966-1970 and 1970-1974. My grad school mentor in cognitive psychology, Willam F. Brewer, was a self-proclaimed revolutionary tenure-risking! young Turk[4], and contrarian that I am, I wrote for him a long paper arguing that the cognitive revolution was a myth; it matured into my most influential academic paper[5]. History and philosophy of psychology have been the heart of my career[6]. In this post, I explain what all the fuss was about and in the next why it still matters for psychology.
Setting the Stage
Description & History vs. Prescription & Philosophy in Science Studies
Hume famously argued that you cannot deduce an ought from an is, but in the study of science it’s never been eschewed. Science has been such a successful enterprise that from the beginning of social science, when the phrase was coined by the personally flamboyant but politically moderate leader of the French Revolution, the Comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791)[7], natural science, especially physics, was seen as the model for others to imitate. If there were a DSM for disciplines, psychology has physics envy, always waiting for Newton, and not wanting for candidates.
The mixing of is and ought existed from the start of philosophy of science, in Auguste Comte’s Positivism. Comte’s central dogma was the historical Law of the Three Stages of intellectual development, each stage being defined by its way of explaining the world. The first stage was the theological stage, in which explanations posited supernatural forces such as gods. The second stage was the metaphysical stage, in which explanations cited hidden, but not supernatural, causes, such as Aristotle’s formal cause. The third stage was the—here comes the part mixing is and ought—scientific stage, which deployed only physically specifiable concepts such as atomic structure. In the last stage, “We [find] … Five fundamental Sciences in successive dependence—Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, and finally Social Physics,” which he later dubbed Sociology. Comte’s ladder of dependence implied the idea of theoretical reduction, in which (deleting Astronomy), Sociology reduces to Physiology, which reduces to Chemistry, and last to Physics. Comte omitted psychology because its subject matter (then) was consciousness, which cannot be scientifically observed, and invited thoughts of a non-physical soul. Comte played around with phrenology as a bridge between Physiology and Sociology but gave up because it had fallen into disrepute.
Early in the 20th century, Comte’s Positivist movement—including a new calendar and a new religion—was wrought into a serious philosophy of science, logical positivism, by the Vienna Circle. It became so influential that by Kuhn’s time it was known as The Received View on Theories.[8] It formalized positivism into a template for psychological science during the behaviorist movement. Positivism’s main rival, proposed at the same time in the same city, was Karl Popper’s falsificationism. It’s important to note that in post-WW I Vienna, cockpit of modernism, the problem of finding a model of science, and more broadly, rationality (especially for Popper) was especially pressing. It had been thought that war had become impossible. Capitalists wouldn’t allow it as bad for international trade, and socialists wouldn’t support it as bad for international solidarity. The failure of rational politics to prevent the war caused an explosion of irrationality in European thought from Cubism, Futurism, and Freudianism, to fascism, communism, and anarchism. Positivists and Popper swam against this tide, upholding science as proof of human rationality and capacity for progress. Then, as the 1960s loomed, came Kuhn, whose new schema for science seemed to unmask progressive reason where it seemed most solid. There were no sunny uplands of Reason awaiting humanity.
Positivism and Popper
Logical positivism offered a seemingly tidy picture of what good science looked like, though I will be necessarily simplifying. Most central was its heritage from Comte’s Positivism, the clean and absolute separation of theory and observation. A science was like an Oreo; two distinct layers held together by binders. At the top were axioms containing mathematical and theoretical terms, as in Newton’s F = M x A, Force equals Mass multiplied by Acceleration. Importantly, theoretical terms were not taken to refer to anything real; they were pure concepts. This followed medieval nominalism—concepts were words (names), and nothing more. Newton’s physics operated this way. Newton refused to provide any referent for gravity—what counted was that by postulating gravity, he could predict events such as eclipses and comets’ appearances. The bottom layer of the Oreo consisted of direct (i.e., unmediated by technology) observations such as, “This steel ball weighs 100 grams,” or “The 100-gram ball took x seconds to traverse y meters in free fall.” Theoretical terms were then given “explicit definitions,” better known to psychologists as operational definitions. So, the operational definition of Mass would be weighing an object at sea level. In animal learning psychology, hunger Drive might be “operationalized” as “x hours of food deprivation.” Operational definitions provided the binders that linked theory to observations. Critically, although often forgotten or glossed over, is that according to logical positivism the operations were not measures or causes of theoretical terms, but definitions in the same sense as “A bachelor is an unmarried male,” true by stipulation. In short, positivism was an anti-realist account of science, in which theories are valued by their usefulness and accuracy, not because they provide a true picture of the world. More formally, a theory was measured by how many confirmations (p < .05) it racked up. Scientific explanation[9] was the mirror image of prediction. When Halley’s comet returns, we explain its return by showing that we could have predicted it beforehand.
Karl Popper (1902-1994) was a contemporary of the positivists, and like them believed that science offered a way forward in the 20th century. Instead of asking how science works, as the positivists did, he asked if it was possible to tell real science apart from enterprises that were not science[10]. It would be a waste of time, effort, and investment to support a phony or pseudo- “science.” Some enterprises, such as the arts, did not claim to be sciences. On the other hand, there were enterprises at the time making unproven claims to scientific status, notably (then) Einstein’s relativity theory and Freud’s psychoanalysis[11]. Both made seemingly testable empirical claims—light bends in a gravitational field; severe toilet training causes phobic anxiety—and thus seemed to meet positivism’s requirement for being scientific when astronomers confirmed Einstein’s claim, and psychoanalysts published papers connecting anal-stage development to later obsessions with being neat and clean.
He noted, however, that physicists and psychoanalysts did not respond to incorrect predictions the same way. Had light not bent, it would have dealt a severe blow to relativity. However, Popper found that his analytic acquaintances responded by refusing to take inconvenient data seriously. E.g., “Well, your slobby friend with strict parents is using the defense mechanism of reaction formation to get back at them.” Similar dodges were deployed by practitioners of recognized pseudo sciences such as astrology. An astrologer might tell a client, “Today will be a good day for money.” Should the client win the lottery s/he will return with a high-five for the confirmation. However, should the client report no financial success, the astrologer might, therapist-like, say “Tell me more about your day.” As the client rambles on, perhaps saying, “Then Jerry gave me an extra slice of pizza,” the astrologer pounces, “See, you got a free lunch!” Popper concluded that the criterion of scientific status was not confirmability (p<.05), but falsifiability. Being wrong was not a sin; refusing to admit being wrong was.
At first glance, Popper’s falsifiability criterion seems modest, even bland, and is still widely deployed. But in fact, it would prove to be the biggest source of controversy between Kuhn and his critics. Kuhn’s historical studies showed that scientists behaved just like defenders of Popper’s test-case pseudo sciences. Disconfirmation rarely slayed existing theories: Disconfirmations were followed by methodological critiques, quiet theoretical changes, and closing of ranks against troublesome youngsters and outsiders (Bill barely got tenure). More importantly—and this boosted Kuhn’s fame by contributing to seeing him as a dangerous nihilist—was that Popper had built a story of the Western philosophical tradition that took falsifiability and openness to disconfirmation as its deep foundation. For Popper, the Greek miracle began when Thales proposed his physical theory—that the essence of all things is water—and invited his students to challenge it. In Popper’s picture, democratic debate was an extension of scientific openness to open debate in politics[12]. In his most influential and controversial book, The open society and its enemies[13] written against fascism, and providing a name for a current political movement, Popper makes Plato the Ur-enemy of the open society. Plato turned his back on the provocations of Socrates and proposed an ideal, static, society run by philosopher-kings employing lies, hidden manipulations, and pervasive social control. Kuhn’s paradigms were the open society’s latest enemy, resting on narrow specialist training and acceptance of the reigning status-quo. Worst, the enemy flourished in science, which was supposed to be the home of open debate.
Structure of Scientific Revolutions
1962 Overture
By the time Kuhn entered the scene, logical positivism—as the “Received View” moniker suggests, was near exhaustion. Its central thesis, the clean and absolute separation of theory from observation was in tatters. History of science and perceptual psychology had demonstrated that expectations affect what we attend to and how we perceive it. Popper used to open lectures by simply commanding his audience to “Observe!” Pause. “That’s what science does, isn’t it? The audience asks, “Observe what?” and Popper replies, in effect, “Exactly!” You can’t even begin to observe the world without some idea—some theoretical guidance—about what needs observing. At the same time, contra both positivism and Popper, history was full of scientists resisting falsifications all sorts of grounds, from opponent’s malice, or stupidity, to picky methodological flaws. Eventually, usually, the truth came out, but rarely with a sudden slap of the head and confession of error. Popper’s falsification criterion fared better than positivism’s verificationism. It carried no metaphysical baggage, and its simplicity made “falsifiability” an attractive motto for scientific life, though scientists still pursued seeking confirmation (p<.05) more than falsification (darn it, p<.06; oh, let’s call it “approaching confirmation!”).
Act One. Kuhn’s Selbstbildung.
Kuhn was a naïf. By the time Structure was published in 1962, Kuhn had a self-directed, eccentric, non-professionalized education in history of science[14]. His only formal graduate training was in physics. Harvard’s President, James Bryant Conant, asked Kuhn to work up an interdisciplinary course on history and philosophy of science, and gave Kuhn the leisure to do so. Kuhn simply read up the topics on his own. He had no grasp of logical positivism or philosophy of science in general. The published fruit of his leisure was a deep study of the Copernican revolution.[15] This earned him a year off at an interdisciplinary thinktank, where he sat in on the discussions and debates of groups of natural and social sciences. Here, he was stunned by the insight that became the construct of the paradigm.
Amongst themselves, natural scientists took existing theories, ideas, and facts as simply given; on the other hand, social scientists debated everything, even the most basic philosophical and conceptual issues: “Is society real?” “Do people have free will?” “Can there be/are there laws of human behavior?” No wonder, he concluded, social science makes no progress. Theoretical and empirical advance can only take place within an accepted framework, for only an accepted framework, a rules of the game, define empirical problems to solve. Real science—natural science—progressively solves problem after problem, until the sorts of difficulties that overthrew earth-centered astronomy arose, requiring construction of a new framework, the sun-centered one. Once adopted, it set its own puzzles, and science resumed after a revolutionary break.
Act Two. Paradigm: Threat or Menace?
Structure was not written for professionals, but was an extension of his project for Harvard, presenting to general readers a broad treatment of scientific practice and progress. Ironically, it was published as a volume in the logical positivists’ book series, the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Developing a fuller and more technical account was thrown off the rails by the reception of Structure. I’m going to sketch his picture, focusing on points most relevant to psychology and the social sciences. Although Kuhn believed the furor stirred up by Structure was caused by grievous misunderstandings of his ideas, he stuck to his guns on even his most radical proposals. The only exception was his concession to Masterson’s “The nature of a paradigm[16]”, which argued that Kuhn’s “paradigm” was ambiguously defined. Kuhn agreed, and substituted two more descriptive terms, the disciplinary matrix and the shared exemplar.
Kuhn’s historical picture of science change is straightforward, at least to non-professionals; he had no idea he was treading on philosophical toes made sore by decades of dispute. Before science, there exist various unsystematized ideas about how the world works, as in folk physics or folk psychology. At some point, these ideas get developed more fully and carefully, as in Aristotle’s physics or his theory of cognition. There might be more than one available framework, and thinkers—philosophers—might argue about which was best. However, if any empirical work was done it was usually intended to rebuke rivals. Popper thought this was all well and good and proper, but Kuhn disagreed. For Kuhn, the key moment for any science occurred when a framework’s advocates became practitioners, investigating nature for its own sake and for their own satisfaction, forming an inward-looking community of mutually respecting members; for Kuhn there can be no solitary scientist without peers to judge him. In the case of astronomy—Kuhn’s topic in The Copernican Revolution—the ancient craft of astrology merged with aspects of Aristotelean physics to create a working community of scientists with a paradigm, that is a disciplinary matrix and shared exemplar. It does not matter to Kuhn’s account that Ptolemaic astronomy/astrology was false, only that it had the intellectual tools to define problems to be solved—it was a science.
The disciplinary matrix is basically a theory but is surrounded by a shroud of ideas providing intellectual scaffolding which may not be explicitly cited or even consciously thought about. In macro-level physics, for example, some assumption is needed about how objects move if left alone. Ptolemaic astronomers believed that movement in empty space is circular; if pressed for justification they might say that it’s screamingly obvious: The heavenly stars, sun, and moon go around us in regular, predictable circles that don’t need explaining. This changed with Newton, and entered physical theory proper, when he asserted that natural motion is linear, steady, and infinite, which, of course, no one ever sees. On the other hand, Aristotle’s physics and Newton’s clockwork philosophy agreed that every event has a determinable cause, while quantum physics dissents[17].
The shared exemplar, however, was Kuhn’s vital concept and was closer to what he originally had in mind with “paradigm.” Learning shared exemplars is the most important aspect of scientific education: training scientists to classify sets of phenomena together as being of the same type. Kuhn often used practices of biological taxonomy to explicate shared exemplars. Just as biologists group together cats as a species despite differences, so physicists, for example, learn to “see” a body in freefall as the same phenomenon, and explainable by the same principles, as an object tossed in the air. Both are acted on by just one external force, gravity, acting on a mass possessing inertia. Naïve people believe there are two forces in the second case, as did Aristotle, who posited a steadily diminishing force of “impetus” imparted to a launched object. Seeing in the “right” way is literally drummed into young minds through problem sets and laboratory work. What doesn’t fit the patterns become the puzzles of puzzle solving, normal science. Kuhn was quite clear that not only was normal science commonplace science, but it was also healthy science.
Of course, some puzzles are hard. A puzzle that resists solution may become what Kuhn dubbed an “anomaly,” but it defines a very fuzzy set. It must be more than a piece that just doesn’t fit; when we do jigsaw puzzles, we usually just set anomalies aside, expecting they’ll fit in eventually. Others, though, may be more disturbing, such as a puzzle piece that looks like a border piece, but can’t be made to fit. In Newtonian physics, an example of the former was the anomalous orbit of Neptune, of the latter, the Michelson-Morley findings challenging the existence of “luminiferous ether.”[18] If anomalies persist, a crisis (Kuhn’s original term) in the science may ensue. Later, Kuhn shifted to “extraordinary science,” a less fevered term, which allowed him to stress parallels with pre-normal science. Scientists begin offering ideas outside the box of tradition, and begin, as in pre-science, to argue over philosophy and wield experiments as weapons against one another. If the older theory fails repeatedly, its grip on scientific training weakens, professors become deans, and a new theory arises and replaces the old one: A scientific revolution.
I want to highlight a feature of scientific training and education that is important to properly understand Kuhn’s paradigm concept, but which may not be apparent to readers. In the undergraduate years, and typically in the first 2-3 years of graduate work, students are, indeed trained, not educated. In the late ’60s and ‘70s, as college enrollment rose, old-fashioned PHYS or CHEM 101 became replaced by “physics for poets” type courses for non-majors. Thus, few readers will have experienced the dogmatism and rigidity of the beginning courses, especially in the lab sections, taken by 18-year-olds. Students read only textbooks until well into grad school. There was only one right outcome of any experiment, and it was your failure if you did not get it (me, repeatedly in CHEM 101). Kuhn stresses that the same attitude carries over into puzzle solving, normal science: If a scientist fails to solve the puzzle, it is his failure, not the paradigm’s. It is a sign of crisis when failures begin to be seen as failures of the dominant theory. Kuhn was also very old-fashioned. The only thing that counted for a normal scientist was the respect and applause of peers; newspaper coverage, TV appearances, even GASP!, a TED Talk, a TV project or a popular book should mean nothing. When Carl Sagan first emerged as a science popularizer, his status as a real scientist became shaky. For Kuhn, a scientific community was not a mere community of folks interested in the same things, like numismatists or philatelists, or even a professional group like the ABA or the ABA[19], but a human community in the strongest sociological sense.
The critical reception of Structure fell into two camps. Mainline philosophers took Kuhn in stride as demonstrating the failings of positivism (e.g. Shapere, 1964, although when he taught Kuhn to scientists in training, it, in the parlance of the day, blew their minds[20].) Most generally, Kuhn’s historical inquiries dealt a mortal blow to positivism by establishing the ubiquity of the Duhem Thesis. Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) had pointed out that in any experiment not only was the theory at test, so was the method used. Should results not support the theory, the validity of the method might be questioned. Claims about psychological entanglement of theory and observation tended to annoy philosophers, but because theories met the world indirectly through observational methods, debating methodological validity was not irrational. For example, indirect observation via a device such as a microscope or telescope depended on having a persuasive theory of the instrument: Cardinals were not entirely wrong for refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope. Positivism was dead, and Kuhn offered one way forward for science studies. Indeed, his framework created puzzles. For example, his definition of community was vague. Was it all physicists or chemists, or just some subset? Some of the studies he cited were of very small groups of 12-20 people.
The fire and brimstone aroused by Structure arose from the Popperians, for whom it was an existential threat to all they held most dear. They organized a symposium to anathematize Kuhn.
· Popper feared that normal science existed but should be stamped out as “a danger to science and, indeed, to our civilization …. The ‘normal’ scientist, in my view, has been taught badly. I believe that all teaching on the University level should be training and encouragement in critical thinking. The ‘normal’ scientist … has been taught in a dogmatic spirit: he is a victim of indoctrination…. My concern is rather that Kuhn, having recognized the failure both of justificationism and falsificationism in providing rational accounts of scientific growth, seems now to fall back on irrationalism.[21].”
· His heir apparent, Imre Lakatos, wrote, “[I]n Kuhn’s view scientific revolution is irrational, a matter for mob psychology. … Kuhn certainly showed that the psychology of science can reveal important and, indeed, sad truths. But the psychology of science is not autonomous; for the—rationally reconstructed—growth of science takes place essentially in the world of ideas, in Plato’s and Popper’s ‘third world’, in the world of articulated knowledge which is independent of knowing subjects. … Popper’s research programme aims at a description of this objective scientific growth. … and seems aim[s] at a description of change in the (‘normal’) scientific mind (whether individual or communal). … But the mirror-image of the third world in the mind of the individual—even in the mind of the ‘normal’—scientists is usually a caricature of the original; and to describe this caricature without relating it to the third-world original might well result in a caricature of a caricature. One cannot understand the history of science without taking into account the interaction of the three worlds.”[22]
· On the other hand, Paul Feyerabend, who knew Kuhn at Berkeley, was a close friend of Popper and of Lakatos[23], and was (in)famous for his irregular and radical teaching, was stimulated to completely abandon Popper’s enterprise and embrace irrationalism. Making a “PLEA FOR HEDONISM”, he wrote, “It is good to be constantly reminded of the fact that science as we know it today is not inescapable and that we may construct a world in which it plays no role whatever (such a world, I venture to suggest, would be more pleasant than the world we live in today). What better reminder is there than the realization that the choice between theories which are sufficiently general to provide us with a comprehensive world view, and which are empirically disconnected may become a matter of taste? That the choice of our basic cosmology may become a matter of taste? …. [T]here is trouble in [Popper’s] third world also, and that the attempt to judge cosmologies by their content may have to be given up. Such a development, far from being undesirable, changes science from a stern and demanding mistress into an attractive and yielding courtesan who tries to anticipate every wish of her lover.”[24]
Popper’s epigones were aghast: Kuhn imperiled Truth, Reason, and the Western Way, and one of them was ecstatic to join the enemy camp. Kuhn summed up his Popperian agony by relating a flashbulb memory. “During a meeting I was talking to a … colleague whom I knew, from a published review, to be enthusiastic about my book. She turned to me and said, ‘Well, Tom, it seems to me that your biggest problem now is showing in what sense science can be empirical’. My jaw dropped and still sags slightly. I have total visual recall of that scene and of no other since de Gaulle’s entry into Paris in 1944.”[25] Everyone, save Masterman (not a philosopher but a computational scientist), had completely misunderstood him.
Act Three. Pulling up the Drawbridge.
After the controversy over Structure, Kuhn went into a lengthy period of despair, trying to find a firmer basis for his normative philosophy of science. He was much influenced by neo-Piagetian developmental psychology. Piaget considered himself a “genetic epistemologist” rather than a psychologist. His expression is unfortunately misleading, because one hears it as Cartesian: knowledge is innate. But Piaget’s view was an individualized Hegelianism: Cognitive development is a constructed pathway to knowledge that is determined (hence we all share it), but its path is not determined by genes or by learning, but by active give and take (thesis and antithesis) between the child and the world. Truth is a construction, but we all construct the same Truth, just as Hegel says justice is a construction ending inevitably in Kant’s categorical imperative. The idea attracted Kuhn, who believed there was no metaphysical The Truth is Out There in Plato’s Third World, yet humans could converge on the same picture of the world through puzzle solving developmental stages interrupted by profound reorganizations of thought. He also looked to evolution. Natural selection he saw as a puzzle-solving process working with a given set of ideas (genes) and changing creatively with the environment. However, Darwinian evolution isn’t seeking a final Perfect Adaptation or Truth—there isn’t one. Kuhn gave some lectures and talks on these ideas but never developed them into a final book.[26]
1924 Encore
Interestingly, the American philosopher E. A. Burtt (1892-1989) anticipated much of Kuhn’s thinking about the cryptic nature of scientific theories in his dissertation, The metaphysics of modern science, published in 1924[27]. Here are some Kuhnish quotes: A scientist, Burtt writes, may “fancy himself free of metaphysical commitments,” but as a result he will hold an unconscious metaphysical framework for three reasons, “For one thing, he will share the ideas of his age on ultimate questions, so far as such ideas do not run counter to his interests or awaken his criticism. …. In the second place, if he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method. …Finally, since human nature demands metaphysics for its full intellectual satisfaction, no great mind can wholly avoid playing with ultimate questions.” Burtt’s first and third reasons describe the metaphysics of the disciplinary matrix; the second one describes the central place of the shared exemplar.
[1] At U CA, not students of the bishop who denied physical reality altogether.
[2] For example, https://www.experimental-history.com/p/new-paradigm-for-psychology-just
[3] Brush S. G. (1974). Should the history of science be rated X? The way scientists behave (according to historians) might not be a good model for students. Science, 183, 1164–1172. https://doi-org.proxy.library.vcu.edu/10.1126/science.183.4130.1164
[4] https://labs.psychology.illinois.edu/~wbrewer/letter72.html ;
[5] Leahey, T. H. (1986). The mythical revolutions of American psychology. American Psychologist, 47, 308-318. Reprinted in J. M. Notterman (Ed.). (1992), The evolution of psychology: Fifty years of the American Psychologist. (pp. 242–266). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10254-017; and W. E. Pickren, & D. Dewsbury, (Eds.). (2002). Evolving perspectives on the history of psychology, 191- 216. American Psychological Association.
[6] Buy my book! https://www.routledge.com/A-Critical-History-of-Psychology-From-Antiquity-to-Modernity/Leahey/p/book/9781032539669 9th ed, 2025.
[7] I wrote a paper about him in high school in the overwrought romantic prose of Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution.
[8] Suppe, F. (Ed.)(1974). The structure of scientific theories. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Suppe wrote a lengthy introduction, widely regarded as an authoritative summary of philosophy of science through Kuhn. I took graduate philosophy of science with Suppe in the fall after he ran the symposium contained in the book.
[9] Hempel, C. G. & Oppenheim, P. (1948). Studies in the logic of explanation. Philosophy of Science, 15, 135-175. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8248%28194804%2915%3A2%3C135%3ASITLOE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E
[10] Leahey, T. H. & Leahey, G. E. (1982). Psychology’s occult doubles: Psychology and the problem of pseudoscience. Chicago: Nelson-Hall.
[11] Most modern analysts do not see it as a science, but as a therapy or useful personal way of thinking, or as Auden called it, “a whole climate of opinion.” Freud, however, always strongly insisted that the Weltanschauung of psychoanalysis was that of natural science.
[12] According to Pierre Vernant, it’s the other way round: Vernant, P. (1984). The Origins of Greek Thought. Cornell University Press.
[13] Popper, K. (2012). The Open Society and Its Enemies. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.
[14] For detail, see Shapin, S. (March, 2023). Paradigms gone wild. Review of B. Mladenović (Ed). (2022). The Last Writings of Thomas Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science (footnote 24). London Review of Books, 45 (7). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n07/steven-shapin/paradigms-gone-wild.
[15] Kuhn, T. S. (1957). The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. I read this for a philosophy of science course as an undergrad. Made a strong impression as a paradigm of historical research.
[16] Masterson, M. (1965). The nature of a paradigm. In I. Lakatos & A. Musgrave (Eds.). Criticism and the growth of knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 59-90.
[17] Toulmin calls these community-accepted patterns ideals of natural order. (S. Toulmin, 1961, Foresight and understanding: An inquiry into the aims of science. New York: Harper).
[18] In a future post I’ll describe the Milliken-Ehrenhaft dispute, in which the winner (Nobel Prize!) did all the stuff that we say is bad research, and the loser was a methodological perfectionist.
[19] Bar, bowling, banking, applied behavior analysis … take your choice.
[20] I talked my wife, an EngLit major, into taking a philosophy of science course with Dudley Shapere, who had just published an important review of Structure. [Shapere, D. (1964). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [review of Kuhn]. The Philosophical Review, 73, 383-94] and was a visiting professor at U. of Illinois. She especially enjoyed how “smoke came out of the ears” of science majors in class.
[21] Normal science and its dangers. In I. Lakatos & A. Musgrave (Eds.). Criticism and the growth of knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 49-58.
[22]Lakatos, I., Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programs. See footnote 19.
[23] They were quite a pair. As a young man in 1944, Lakatos was a hardline Hungarian Stalinist, who persuaded a young woman to commit suicide rather than risk falling into Nazi hands. He made a career in the Communist regime, though not without suffering betrayals himself. He turned against Marxism and fled to London in 1956 when the short-live anticommunist revolt was smashed by Russian tanks. He became a respectable philosopher, but his applications for British citizenship were quietly quashed by MI5. Born in Austria, Feyerabend was acquainted with Nazism and Communism, signing on to neither. During his long career he moved steadily towards more radical positions. He had much experience in theater, and confessed loving to shock people. His best friend was Lakatos, and it appears from correspondence that he and Lakatos schemed to stage an epic WWE- type philosophical smackdown, which he would lose to Lakatos. The scheme was cut short by Lakatos’ death. Now, one suspects, it would by fought with tweets. See: Musgrave, Alan and Charles Pigden, "Imre Lakatos", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/lakatos/, and Oberheim, Eric and John Preston, "Paul Feyerabend", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2025 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2025/entries/feyerabend/ .
[24] Feyerabend, P. Consolations for the specialist. See footnote 19.
[25] Kuhn, T. Reflections on my critics. See footnote 19.
[26] B. Mladenović (Ed). (2022). The Last Writings of Thomas Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. See also Shapin, footnote 14.
[27] Burtt, E. A. (1954). The metaphysical foundations of modern physical science. 2nd, rev. ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. First ed. 1924. I read it for an undergraduate history of science course.