Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a remarkable book. It has sold over 1 million copies, a startling number for an academic title.Footnote ¹ It has been translated into numerous languages, ensuring that its reach is nearly endless. People have wondered how such a book could have come to be written.

Some have suggested that the success of Structure was quite accidental (see Reference FullerFuller 2000), or that any number of other contemporary books could have achieved the success that Structure achieved. But I believe that there is another story to tell that explains why Structure is the book that it is and had the impact it had.Footnote ²

Kuhn had quite atypical experiences, even before the publication of Structure. George Reisch has described Kuhn’s unusual early education at a number of alternative progressive private schools in the United States (see Reference ReischReisch 2019; see also Reference Kuhn, Conant and JohnKuhn 1997/2000, 256–259). Kuhn suggests that these schools “made a major contribution to [his] independence of mind” (Reference Kuhn, Conant and JohnKuhn 1997/2000, 257). Kuhn’s experiences when he attended Harvard were also atypical. Though he was studying physics, he was able to foster his interests in both science and the humanities by writing for The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper (Reference Kuhn, Conant and JohnKuhn 1997/2000, 264; see also 268).Footnote ³ Kuhn completed his bachelor’s degree in three years, and he immediately went to work at the Radio Research Laboratory, working for the American war effort (see Reference Kuhn, Conant and JohnKuhn 1997/2000, 268–269). This is hardly the typical path even at Harvard.

When Kuhn returned from his service in the military, he began work on a dissertation in physics with John Van Vleck, who was then the Chair of the Physics Department at Harvard (see Reference BleaneyBleaney 1982, 638). Kuhn was already familiar with Van Vleck, as he was the “head … of the theory group” at the Radio Research Laboratory during the war (see Reference BleaneyBleaney 1982, 628; 637; see also Reference Kuhn, Conant and JohnKuhn 1997/2000, 268–269). Together with Van Vleck, Kuhn published “A Simplified Method of Computing the Cohesive Energies of Monovalent Metals,” one of Kuhn’s first publications. Van Vleck, in turn, was no ordinary scientist. He served as President of the American Physical Society in 1952–1953, and Vice President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1956–1957. And he would later go on to win the Nobel Prize for physics in 1977 (Reference BleaneyBleaney 1982, 628).Footnote ⁴ Indeed, Van Vleck was not the only scientist of Nobel Prize caliber Kuhn encountered at Harvard. He also took courses in graduate school with Percy Bridgman and Julian Schwinger (see Reference Kuhn, Conant and JohnKuhn 1997/2000, 267–268 and 274–275).Footnote ⁵

In addition to working with a supervisor who was exceptional in his accomplishments, Kuhn also had peers who were exceptional. One of Kuhn’s age peers was Philip W. Anderson. Anderson started his undergraduate education at Harvard in 1940, the same year Kuhn did, worked at the Radio Research Laboratory immediately after finishing his bachelor’s degree, as Kuhn did, and returned to Harvard after the war to complete a Ph.D. under Van Vleck’s direction, as Kuhn did (see Nobel 1977). Anderson won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977, along with Van Vleck and Nevill Mott.Footnote ⁶ Kuhn was moving in elite circles, among people who were marked for success.

Kuhn worked with other exceptionally accomplished people during this time, most significantly, James B. Conant, the President of Harvard. The details of this relationship are outlined in Chapter 2, but I will highlight some of the key points here. When Kuhn was completing his Ph.D. in physics, Conant invited him to work as an assistant for him in the teaching of a General Education course in the history of science. This was part of an initiative of Conant’s to ensure that the American elite were science-literate. It was a course designed for non-science majors. Conant’s influence in America at this time was wide-ranging and profound. He had been an advisor on the Manhattan Project and played a significant role in the creation of the National Science Foundation. In fact, Conant was a widely known public figure, as he had appeared on the cover of Time magazine.Footnote ⁷ This involvement with Conant proved to be most significant, given the direction Kuhn’s career subsequently took. In particular, Conant supported Kuhn’s application to the Harvard Society of Fellows, which afforded Kuhn the opportunity to retrain as a historian of science upon completing his Ph.D. in physics (see Reference Kuhn, Conant and JohnKuhn 1997/2000, 276; 278–279). Moreover, when Kuhn was writing Structure, he would draw extensively on material from the history of science course, specifically the cases from the history of chemistry that figured in the course. So Kuhn was, without a doubt, moving among some of the most powerful and accomplished researchers of his time.Footnote ⁸

Although Kuhn was, like his peers, marked for success, his career was not without setbacks. He was denied tenure at Harvard in the mid-1950s, a significant psychological and professional blow. And he was denied a promotion to full professor in the Philosophy Department at UC Berkeley in the early 1960s, just before Structure was published.

Nonetheless, even through these challenging experiences, Kuhn’s social capital as an academic continued to grow. The year Structure was published, he oversaw a project in Denmark sponsored by the American Physical Society, a project which involved constructing an archive of material related to the quantum revolution in physics in the early twentieth century. The goal of the project was to interview as many of the participants in the revolution as possible, before they died. This project put Kuhn in contact with many of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century. In fact, Kuhn interviewed Niels Bohr on a number of occasions, including just one week before his death.Footnote ⁹ Clearly, the fact that he was chosen to oversee such a project indicates that he was highly respected by physicists and historians of science, even before the publication of Structure.

As mentioned above, his interactions with Conant and involvement in the General Education science courses had a significant impact on Kuhn. The idea of writing a book about scientific revolutions first occurred to Kuhn in 1947, when he was preparing lectures for the course in the history of science. While trying to make sense of Aristotle’s physics, he had a transformative experience. He came to realize that Aristotle was involved in a fundamentally different sort of enterprise than Galileo. And, rather than regarding Aristotle’s worldview as mistaken, he saw that it provided a fundamentally different account of the world, that is, fundamentally different from either Galileo’s or Newton’s account. This experience also undermined his previous conviction that the growth of scientific knowledge is cumulative, with no significant setbacks.

But Kuhn’s Aristotle epiphany was just the beginning of a very long process. As Kuhn notes, “it was fifteen years between the time these ideas started and the time [he] was finally able to write Structure” (see Reference Kuhn, Conant and JohnKuhn 1997/2000, 292). Many other important insights that are central to Structure still eluded Kuhn. Kuhn claims that his Lowell lectures, “The Quest for Physical Theory,” given in 1951, were his first attempt to write Structure (see Reference Kuhn, Conant and JohnKuhn 1997/2000, 289; Kuhn 1977, xvi). But, in the course of giving the lectures, he realized that he was not yet ready to write the book.Footnote ¹⁰ In fact, it was not until the mid-1950s that he began to really appreciate the role of normal science, the “periods governed by one or another traditional mode of practice … [that] necessarily [intervene] between revolutions” (see Kuhn 1977, xvii). Without the concept of normal science, he was in no position to write the book.

Throughout his career, Kuhn would underestimate the amount of time and work it would take to complete projects. Robert K. Merton notes that

Kuhn’s inability to estimate how long things would take, and the high standards that he held himself to, would repeatedly delay him in reaching his goals. As I have noted elsewhere, his lecture notes are marked up with critical remarks about how the lecture went, and what he would not do again next time (see Reference WrayWray 2018b). In fact, when Kuhn died, he left an unfinished manuscript that he had been alluding to for decades.Footnote ¹¹

But the delays affecting the publication of Structure were not wholly detrimental. In fact, they allowed Kuhn to develop his ideas, and ensured that he did not publish the book prematurely. Some of the most influential concepts that figure in Structure, normal science and paradigm, for example, did not even enter Kuhn’s mind until ten or so years after he first thought of writing a book about scientific revolutions. Kuhn had the good sense to wait until he had worked out his ideas. No doubt this is part of what explains the success of the book.

Structure was finally published in 1962. It was initially published as a volume in the Encyclopedia of Unified Science, a series that originated with the Vienna Circle positivists. As he was making the final revisions to his manuscript, Kuhn expressed some concern to the publisher that his book would not get the attention it deserved, given the declining popularity of the Encyclopedia and its fading influence (see Reference Kuhn, Conant and JohnKuhn 1997/2000, 300). In hindsight, we can say that the series was in its final days in the early 1960s. The particular volume that Kuhn was commissioned to write was intended to be devoted to the history of science. Its path to production was somewhat precarious. It seems that others had been invited to write the volume and had declined before Kuhn was invited to do so (see Reference Kuhn, Conant and JohnKuhn 1997/2000, 291–292). Specifically, Kuhn notes that I. B. Cohen and Aldo Mieli had been asked to write the volume. When Cohen declined, he suggested Kuhn to the editors (see Reference Kuhn, Conant and JohnKuhn 1997/2000, 292).

Kuhn’s worries about publishing the book as a volume in the Encyclopedia were wholly unfounded. Structure was quickly regarded as a book well worth reading, not only by historians and philosophers of science, but also by many other academics and educated laypeople. Among Kuhn’s collected papers, lectures and manuscripts in the archives at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are countless letters. Many are from influential economists, psychologists and other academics. There is even a set of letters discussing a possible meeting between Kuhn and Newt Gingrich.Footnote ¹² Many people were very excited by Kuhn’s book.

In the 1970s, Merton noted that “in the first dozen years since its publication, [Structure] has given rise to a library of appreciative applications and diversely critical commentary” (see Reference MertonMerton 1977, 106; emphasis added). And since the 1970s this library has continued to expand. In fact, Kuhn was not only inundated with letters expressing positive responses to the book, but also manuscripts inspired by it. In 1973, in response to one fan who sent along a manuscript, Kuhn remarked that

Indeed, the many unsolicited manuscripts Kuhn received would not be the most significant problem that the book created for him. The most significant challenges he faced were the criticisms, many of them based on misunderstandings of Structure.

My aim in this book is twofold. First, I aim to reconstruct the writing of Structure, clarifying the intellectual influences on Kuhn as he wrote the book. The existing studies of Kuhn have tended to focus on the influence of Kuhn’s social milieu, understood in the broadest terms, with special attention given to the culture of Cold War America. Though these studies are often insightful, they fail to take adequate account of the intellectual influences on Kuhn as he wrote Structure. Second, I will trace the impact of Structure, with particular attention to its influence on the sociology of science, the history of science and the philosophy of science.

I will also discuss its broader influence, especially in the social sciences. In fact, Kuhn’s influence in the social sciences is most interesting. Nowhere is the broad appeal of the concepts he developed more profound than in those fields. Social scientists found both the concepts and the general conception of science Kuhn developed highly fertile. The publication of Structure initiated a period of extensive reflection among social scientists on (i) the nature of the social sciences, (ii) their relationship to the natural sciences and (iii) the capacities of the social sciences to produce knowledge. This is quite ironic, as Kuhn claims to have discovered the paradigm concept while working among social scientists at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, at Stanford University. Kuhn describes how he realized that what the social sciences lacked, and what characterizes the natural sciences, are paradigms – fundamental research achievements that play an essential role in creating a consensus in a field and that make the sort of progress that we associate with the natural sciences possible. Kuhn also ignited a revolution of sorts in the sociology of science, one with which he was never fully comfortable.

I will also examine Kuhn’s difficult relationship with the history of science. Though he spent many years working in history departments or involved in history of science programs, the impact he had on the history of science was comparatively insignificant: that is, when compared to the impact he had on the sociology of science and the philosophy of science. And recent assessments of his work by historians are not particularly flattering. Finally, I will also examine the impact Kuhn has had on the philosophy of science. On the one hand, Kuhn’s legacy has been a set of problems that are a consequence of a particular reading of Structure, one that settled into place by around 1970. This has left us with a Kuhnian position of sorts that is widely deemed to be deeply problematic, as it threatens the integrity of science and scientific knowledge. On the other hand, his notion of revolutionary theory change left a lasting impact on debates and developments in contemporary philosophy of science, most notably in the realism/anti-realism debates. A central problem in these debates is what I call the problem of theory change, a problem that takes its form from Kuhn’s Structure.

I will begin with a discussion of the Aristotle experience, the experience that set Kuhn on a new path away from a career in physics and toward a career in the history of science.

I have included information from Kuhn’s curriculum vitae, prepared for an NSF application from the late 1980s, as a useful guide through the course of Kuhn’s career.

Vita of Thomas S. Kuhn (Source: TSK Archives, Box 20: Folder 12, NSF Research Reports)