The Structure of my Scientific Revolution, part 1
How science historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn is helping me understand my experience inside and outside of academia
I read Thomas Kuhn’s influential book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” in college. My paperback copy, bought used from the University of Washington bookstore, has an abstract set of cubes and circles on the dark blue cover. The first half of the book is densely decorated with carefully penciled notes, underlined sections, numbered points, and question marks. Separated from the first half by a folded page corner, the second half of the book remains unmarked. Perhaps I got burned out on Kuhn’s elaborate prose, or I got busy with another project, or maybe we were only assigned the first half of the book.
I don’t know how much I understood what Kuhn was proposing when I first read it, but regardless, this book made a big impression on me. It’s one of the few college textbooks I have carried with me, move after move and book purge after purge. I picked it back up a few months ago while unpacking books in our new house, and found it just as impactful on a second read. Re-reading parts of “Structure” (and the entry on Thomas Kuhn in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) gave me more than one shiver of recognition. Many of the ways Kuhn describes science and scientific communities resonate with my understanding of the same, especially now that I have several decades of experience as an academic scientist behind me. Having just resigned from my faculty position, I find Kuhn’s framework for understanding scientific progress an interesting lens through which to also examine my experience as an ex-academic. Even more broadly, hope you’ll find it valuable to consider how we accept certain mindsets, how hard it can be to stop accepting them, and what happens to our worldview when we reject them.
Below I summarize my understanding of Kuhn’s thesis about the history of science—that it has cycled through the stages of normal science, the slow accumulation of anomalies, then reaching a crisis, and finally a revolution that brings about a new version of normal science. I also include my first thoughts on how these concepts apply to my “unprofessoring” experience.
Normal Science
During periods of what Kuhn calls “normal science”, research proceeds under the organizing principle of a “paradigm.” This word has many meanings, and he didn’t do a great job of defining his usage in the first edition of “Structure”, but it’s a fascinating concept. In an afterward to the later edition of “Structure”, Kuhn clarifies that paradigm is meant to convey “the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by the members of a given community”. It’s “just the way things are done”, the subconscious and conscious beliefs, attitudes and assumptions under which we operate.
For more than three decades, almost every choice I made was shaped by my understanding that “I want to be a biology professor”, along with all the implicit beliefs and values that came with that understanding. This was my paradigm, my set of guiding stars. It helped me make decisions about how to use my time, which aspects of my personality and interests I should cultivate and which I should tuck away, and what exactly I should be striving for. I understood what made a good project, a good experiment, a good paper, a good talk, a good colleague. This kind of knowledge is similar to what is called “a hidden curriculum” and I was lucky to have been privy to it for most of my life.
Exemplars
Kuhn also calls normal science “puzzle-solving”. Perhaps this sounds a bit insulting, but he is referring to the way in which the approaches used to solve a scientific problem are at some level well-established and a solution is generally expected. This is because, he says, the work done under a prevailing paradigm is performed and assessed in comparison to what he terms exemplars, “the concrete puzzle-solutions which . . . replace explicit rules a as a basis for the solution” for other puzzles. In other words, instead of establishing objective rules about how to ask and answer questions about the world, scientists evaluate experiments and their results based on similarity to a previously agreed-upon standard.
He claims that a big part of scientific training is learning about these exemplars. As the Encyclopedia explains it, “training with exemplars enables scientists to see new [puzzles] in terms of familiar puzzles and hence enables them to see potential solutions.” For me, such a framework goes a long way towards explaining the difficulty in explaining how to write a good paper or do a great experiment—instead scientists tend to defer to “I know it when I see it”. Rather than rules, we compare to agreed-upon examples of great papers or great experiments.
I was trained in the academic paradigm by growing up in an academic family, and then by attending elite academic institutions. I’ve been surrounded by exemplary exemplars. For most problems that I faced, whether it was a failed project or starting a family while pre-tenure, I could usually find someone in my immediate community who had solved it. And I measured my success at solving those problems by how closely I matched what I saw around me; I never stepped back to ask if this approach was giving me the life I wanted, if the promise of a faculty position had borne out, if it was all worth it.
Anomalies
According to Kuhn, a scientific revolution occurs when a series of anomalies that don’t adhere to the prevailing paradigm build up to the point where confidence in the current paradigm is lost (As an aside, I don’t think anomalies are required for a scientific revolution—the discovery of the structure of DNA is an example!). Early on in normal science, anomalies are ignored or explained away, but eventually they build up to the point where revolution is needed. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’.”
With respect to the academic paradigm, I encountered anomalies pretty early on, but I pushed past them. Even when things got tough during my postdoc or before tenure, I figured that these rough patches were just temporary and I needed to hang in there. Even when I realized I wasn’t a superstar, that I wouldn’t be getting a faculty position in the same elite schools I’d trained in, that I wasn’t going to be building an huge lab or winning awards, I stuck with it. Even when I was miserable, couldn’t sleep, ground my teeth, developed migraines, and snapped at my family, I chalked it up to personal shortcomings rather than systemic failures. Even when I couldn’t get a job near our extended family, when we had to raise our kid without any family nearby, when I experienced harassment or my work was trivialized, I clung to the belief that my research and teaching were important enough to justify any sacrifice.
Crisis and Revolution
As anomalies build up, a crisis is reached, and eventually a new paradigm will take over. The new paradigm is not necessarily closer to “the truth”, but it is more useful at addressing the anomalies that the previous paradigm could not. How and when a scientific crisis is reached seems to me the most vague (and therefore interesting!) aspect of Kuhn’s theory. When are the anomalies “too much?” This seems dependent on the characteristics of the current paradigm—a particularly dominant paradigm might dictate a particularly high tolerance for anomalies and a crisis might take a long time to appear.
I think my academic paradigm was just this tenacious. One especially effective component of my thinking: just questioning the paradigm meant I wasn’t good enough at fitting into it—and I couldn’t bear to admit that I might fail at fitting in, so I didn’t question things. As a result, anomalies built up for decades and decades, until suddenly, I couldn’t hold them all and I had an irreversible crisis. I stopped thinking “I want to be a Biology professor” and instantaneously I was outside the paradigm. This suddenness, I believe, was created by my resistance to truly interrogating what all the anomalies in my life meant because I believed that doubt was unacceptable. Once the dam broke, and I’d admitted all these anomalies to myself, there was no going back.
What’s next:
In upcoming newsletters, I’ll share an essay describing this moment of personal crisis, and tell you what new paradigms of work and life might be evolving for me. I’ll also discuss a few concepts that Kuhn extrapolates from the framework above, including the ideas that scientific paradigms encourage conservatism (not politically! just that scientists resist change); that science evolves rather than progresses towards perfection, and that the science done under different paradigms can’t be compared. I hope it’ll be as fun for you to read about as it’s been to think and write about. I’d love to hear your feedback, questions, and thoughts in the comments, or via email to unprofessoring@substack.com.
Discussion Section
What do you think about Kuhn’s ideas about how science progresses? Do you agree?
What paradigms are you operating under? What paradigms have you rejected?
Really interesting application of Kuhn’s work.
I am happy to leave science-oriented academia in the rear view mirror after almost 30 years. There is life outside of it and in spite of it.
Make the most out of your new paradigm of living and hopefully much less stress and anguish.
(My copy of Kuhn is second edition, magenta cover and cost $1.75!)