Kuhnianism and Neo-Kantianism: On Friedman’s Account of Scientific Change

ABSTRACT

Friedman’s perspective on scientific change is a sophisticated attempt to combine Kantian transcendental philosophy and the Kuhnian historiographical model. In this article, I will argue that Friedman’s account, despite its virtues, fails to achieve the philosophical goals that it self-consciously sets, namely to unproblematically combine the revolutionary perspective of scientific development and the neo-Kantian philosophical framework. As I attempt to show, the impossibility of putting together these two aspects stems from the incompatibility between (a) Friedman’s neo-Kantian conception of the role of philosophy and the role of the notion of incommensurability, and (b) the framework of transcendental idealism and the radical character of scientific revolutions. Hence, I suggest that pace Friedman and pace Kuhn’s own self-understanding, the Kuhnian theory of scientific revolutions cannot be seen as ‘Kantianism with moveable categories’ and consequently we should either abandon the notion of radical scientific revolution or place the Kuhnian account into another, non-Kantian philosophical framework.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Evgenia Mylonaki and Theodore Arabatzis for reading and commenting on a draft version of this paper. I would also like to thank the two anonymous referees of this journal for their extremely helpful remarks.

Notes

1 See, for example, one of the first reviews of Structure: ‘Kuhn is well aware of the relativism implied by his view, and his common sense and feeling for history make him struggle mightily to soften the dismal conclusion’ (Shapere 1964, 392). For a more recent assessment of the accusation of relativism see Bird (2012), 874–875.

2 ‘Already it should be clear that the explanation [of scientific progress] must, in the final analysis, be psychological or sociological’ (Kuhn 1970, 21).

3 While it may be an exaggeration to talk about a Kantian turn, it would not be an exaggeration to talk about a ‘reawaken[ing] [of] interest in Kantian transcendental philosophy’ (Friedman 1998, 113). The most explicit part of this awakening is without doubt P. F. Strawson’s ([1966] 2007) The Bounds of Sense. But we should not forget that the explicit return to Kantian themes was prepared by the preceding attacks on the dominant empiricist view. A central role, among them, is the Sellarsian attack on the ‘Myth of the Given’ (Sellars [1956] 1997). At the same time, another attack on the dominant empiricist view, in the field of philosophy of perception, is N. R. Hanson’s ([1958] 2010) Patterns of Discovery.

4 The word ‘lexicon’ in the specific passage stands as another term for paradigm, since, in his later work, Kuhn preferred to talk about paradigms in linguistic terms. See also Kuhn (1993), 331.

5 Another way to present this kind of Kantianism is to declare the ‘plurality of the phenomenal worlds thesis’ (Hoyningen-Huene 1993, ch. 2).

6 The dynamical or historical form of Kantianism seems tempting to the extent that it can (or it seems it can) combine the revolutionary image of scientific development along with a non-relativistic conception of scientific rationality. This kind of revised dynamical Kantianism tempted philosophers of science, from different traditions, a long time before Kuhn. See the reconstruction of (some) logical positivists provided by Friedman in section 2 below. See also the work of Gaston Bachelard ([1934] 1984; [1940] 2005).

7 In place of this elaboration Kuhn has used biological evolution to simulate scientific development, thus providing another metaphor for scientific change (Kuhn 2000, 97–104). But a metaphor, no matter how helpful, cannot resolve the aforementioned philosophical problem.

8 In his more recent work, Friedman (2010a, 2011) has attempted to expand his perspective by taking into account various technological, institutional, and political developments that are inextricably entangled with scientific development. The core of his account, though, remained intact.

9 Friedman (2010a, 498; 2011, 431) stresses, ‘Unlike many philosophical responses to Kuhn … my approach, like Kuhn’s, is essentially historical’. What this utterance, first and foremost, means is that we should not return to a traditional cumulative approach of scientific change.

10 However, the similarities between Kuhn and Friedman are found only in the philosophical goal of minimising the relativistic implications of the Kuhnian historiographical model, not in the particular philosophical ways they employ in order to achieve this particular goal. See Friedman (2002), 184.

11 For Reichenbach’s explicit revision of the Kantian a priori see Friedman (2001, 30–31; 2002, 174–175). For Carnap’s implicit elaboration of a notion of a dynamical a priori see Friedman (2001, 31–33; 2002, 175–176). From a historical point of view, it is very interesting to mention that, during the same period in which the logical empiricists were working, and in a completely different philosophical tradition, Bachelard developed an epistemological account for scientific evolution that is based on a dynamic conception of the Kantian a priori, and he calls this account ‘Kantisme de deuxième approximation’ (Kantianism of second approximation) (Bachelard [1940] 2005, 94).

12 Also ‘in Thomas Kuhn’s theory of the nature and character of scientific revolutions we find an informal counterpart of the relativized conception of constitutive a priori principles first developed by the logical empiricists’ (Friedman 2002, 181).

13

A recalcitrant experience can, I have already argued, be accommodated by any of various alternative re-evaluations in various alternative quarters of the total system; but, in the cases which we are now imagining, our natural tendency to disturb the total system as little as possible would lead us to focus our revisions upon these specific statements concerning brick houses or centaurs. (Quine [1951] 1961, 44)

14 He accepts a relativised and dynamic rather than a fixed and unrevisable notion of the constitutive a priori.

15 It is not the nature of the constitutive principles that makes them immune to the empirical tests. It is not their logical structure that makes them unfalsifiable; rather it is their structural position in the particular system of knowledge that provides their empirical incontestability. Friedman argues that, in another framework where those same principles have a different (non-constitutive) structural position, they can and do face the ‘tribunal of experience’ (Friedman 2001, 85–92).

16

These relativized a priori principles constitute what Kuhn calls paradigms: at least relatively stable sets of rules of the game, as it were, that define or make possible the problem-solving activities of normal science—including, in particular, the rigorous formulation and testing of properly empirical laws. In periods of deep conceptual revolution it is precisely these constitutively a priori principles which are themselves subject to change—under intense pressure, no doubt, from new empirical findings and especially anomalies. (Friedman 2001, 45)

17 Recall that, also according to Kuhn, a paradigm or a lexicon is not primarily a set of beliefs but a framework of possible experience:

What I have been calling a lexical taxonomy might, that is, better be called a conceptual scheme, where the ‘very notion’ of a conceptual scheme is not that of a set of beliefs but of a particular operating mode of a mental module prerequisite to having beliefs, a mode that at once supplies and bounds the set of beliefs it is possible to conceive. (Kuhn 2000, 94)

18 In his recent work, Friedman (2010b, 697–698) acknowledged the way that his earlier presentations of the constitutive principles were influenced by the sharp distinction, emphasised by Schlick, between an uninterpreted axiomatic system and intuitive perceptible experience. He also acknowledged that this was a problematic presentation and he abandoned the notion of ‘coordination’. However, those revisions do not affect the criticism that I am about to address.

19 We can see, for instance, that the Newtonian revolution owes a lot to the philosophical elaborations of Descartes, which framed a mechanistic conception of nature; and also that Einstein’s theory of relativity was prepared by the debate between Helmholtz and Poincaré on the foundations of geometry.

20 This is a term that Friedman borrows from Jürgen Habermas (Friedman 2001, 53–56; 2002, 184). Communicative rationality is presented in contrast to instrumental rationality. The latter concerns the appropriate matching of means and ends, while the former aims for an agreement or consensus based on mutually accepted ways of reasoning.

21 Note that, according to Friedman, this role of articulating and contextualising the fundamental constitutive principles of science is the programmatic project of transcendental philosophy. This ‘transcendental project’ should take a historicist and dynamic form. See Friedman (2008a, 251; 2008b, 111). This is not to say that Kant’s philosophy can always play the role of the philosophical supplement of each and every scientific revolution. According to Friedman, other philosophical elaborations—such as Descartes’s or Helmholtz’s or Poincarẻ’s—can play this role. What is unique in the Kantian transcendental tradition is the meta-philosophical thesis that scientific philosophy can play this role.

22 Whether or not Friedman is entitled to attribute such a role to philosophy is the subject matter of my criticism in section 3.2 below.

23 For the difference between the notion of ‘constitutive’ and ‘regulative’, see Friedman (1991).

24 For a detailed historical discussion of the tradition of neo-Kantianism, see Friedman (2000, 25–38; 2008a).

25 That is, ‘Kantianism with moveable categories’. See section 1 above.

26 This is what he calls a prospective notion of rationality.

27 This way of presenting the notion of paradigm had triggered, in the critical reception of Structure, various criticisms for ambiguity and lack of clarity. See, for example, Masterman (1970).

28 ‘Disciplinary matrix’ is one of the alternative names that Kuhn uses for paradigm in his later works. Other names are ‘lexicon’ and ‘lexical taxonomy’.

29 This second function is the particular constitutive function that Friedman puts at the centre of his analysis.

30 One could object that Friedman was never concerned with the notion of ‘disciplinary matrix’ or other post-Structure Kuhnian formulations and that he accepts paradigms in their initial sense. Thus he cannot be criticised for not complying with the post-Structure formulations. However, Kuhn’s later reformulations—as he himself points out (Kuhn 1997, 294)—is a clarification and not a revision of the initial conception of paradigms. Thus one should provide good reasons in order to show that the Kuhnian ‘second thoughts on paradigms’ consists of a substantial revision of the notion of paradigm we can find in Structure. Friedman does not provide such reasons and I don’t think that there are any.

31 Lakatos (1971, 100–105). However, note that for Lakatos this is a flaw of the Kuhnian conception rather than a virtue. For this reason the Kuhnian conception is characterised by Lakatos as ‘elitist’.

32 It is well known that Polanyi’s supporters accused Kuhn of plagiarism and that the latter added the following footnote in the second edition of Structure: ‘Michael Polanyi has brilliantly developed a very similar theme, arguing that much of the scientist’s success depends upon “tacit knowledge”, i.e. upon knowledge that is acquired through practice and cannot be articulated explicitly’ (Kuhn [1962] 1996, 44n1). For an interesting explanation why Kuhn’s Structure and not Polanyi’s book became famous, see Timmins (2013).

33 See, for example, the Lakatosian ‘hard core’ of the scientific research programmes (Lakatos 1971).

34 Paul K. Feyerabend (1962) too, in his early work, argues that the term incommensurability is applied only in pairs of theories that do not share the same ontology. Thus, different ontology is the source of incommensurability.

35 For instance, he points out,

It is precisely this revolutionary experience, in fact, that has revealed that our knowledge has foundations in the present sense: subject-defining or constitutive paradigms whose revision entails a genuine expansion of our space of intellectual possibilities, to such an extent, in periods of radical conceptual revolution, that a straightforward appeal to empirical evidence is then no longer directly relevant. And it is at this point, moreover, that philosophy plays its own distinctive role, not so much in justifying or securing a new paradigm where empirical evidence cannot yet do so, but rather in guiding the articulation of the new space of possibilities and making the serious consideration of the new paradigm a rational and responsible option. (Friedman 2002, 190)

36 I find Korkut’s argument on the issue very convincing.

37

Given a lexical taxonomy, or what I’ll mostly now call simply a lexicon, there are all sorts of different statements that can be made, and all sorts of theories that can be developed. Standard techniques will lead to some of these being accepted as true, others rejected as false. But there are also statements which could be made, theories which could be developed, within some other taxonomy but which cannot be made with this one, and vice versa. (Kuhn 2000, 93)

38

If intuition has to conform to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well represent this possibility to myself. (Kant [1781] 1998, 110)

39 As Alan Richardson (2010, 283) stresses, ‘a priori principles cannot be falsified and new ones cannot be better able to meet the tribunal of experience’.

40

I want to urge that this second dualism of scheme and content, of organizing system and something waiting to be organized, cannot be made intelligible and defensible. It is itself a dogma of empiricism, the third dogma. The third, and perhaps the last, for if we give it up it is not clear that there is anything distinctive left to call empiricism. (Davidson 1973, 11)

41 Note the following combination of statements:

(1) The original Kantian conception of objectivity, in particular, was explicitly intended to undermine such a naively realistic interpretation of scientific knowledge, through its sharp distinction between appearances and things in themselves, and its accompanying insistence that our best knowledge of nature—natural scientific knowledge—extends only to appearances. So the way is similarly open, on our modified Kantian conception, simply to define scientific truth, in a Peircean vein, as whatever the ideal community of inquiry eventually agrees to. (Friedman 2001, 67–68)

(2) Giving up the opposition between appearances and things in themselves therefore means giving up the notion of a distinct and independent faculty of intuition as well. (Friedman 1996, 442)

42 Of course Friedman could abandon the idea that receptivity makes ‘an even notionally separable contribution to its co-operation with spontaneity’ (McDowell 1996, 51). However, this would have tremendous consequences on Friedman’s acceptance of the framework of transcendental idealism and the relevant commitment to the Kantian philosophy. This move leads closer to a post-Kantian philosophical conception. Friedman (1996) has explicitly denounced a move like this.

43

The present conception of scientific rationality is consistent with such ‘anti-realist’ conceptions of scientific truth, but it is in no way committed to them. Perhaps the best way to put the point … is that the present conception of scientific rationality does not involve a parallel conception of scientific truth—either ‘realist’ or ‘anti-realist’. (Friedman 2001, 68n83)

44 Since the Kantian ambition for the description of the one and fixed phenomenal world has become obsolete by the scientific evolution and since we refer to a sort of relativised but still constitutive a priori, we should admit the plurality of phenomenal worlds. See the ‘plurality-of-phenomenal-worlds thesis’ in Hoyningen-Huene (1993), 36–42.