Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Developments of History and Philosophy of Science and Science and Technology Studies in Taiwan: A Short Story

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Notes

1 That was a time in Taiwan when copyrighted English books were expensive, affordable only for professors, teachers, and medical, science, and engineering students. And books of Western philosophy and philosophy of science were typically for poor philosophy students in the humanities. Books in “pirate edition” 海盜版, however, were cheap and handy, popular for a small number of serious graduate students, and perhaps even for professors as well.

2 Several competing publishers engaged in pirate printings; thus, no one professor could dictate what kind of books (e.g., only in analytic philosophy) be printed. Here is a sample book list I dug up: Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1971 pirate print of the 1968 edition); Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (pirate print, ca. 1975); Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (1969 pirate print of the original 1965); Kuhn, Structure (1977 pirate print of Structure's second edition); and Lakatos and Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1977 pirate print of the original 1970).

3 As that was during pre-Internet times, translation communications and confirmations of corrections and collations were almost nonexistent between the publisher Yun-Cheng and its translators, divided by the Pacific Ocean. The quality of the final version of the translation is debatable anyway, but Yun-Cheng decided to add to the translator list Wang Daohuan 王道還, also studying in the United States as a biological anthropology graduate student. Wang made great efforts in correcting translation errors of the first two translators. All three translators, as US-trained young scholars, were back among Taiwan's academics around 1985. I was not aware then that there was already a Chinese translation of Structure in China, published five years earlier.

4 This translation with an odd title probably consists of three small books of Polanyi's: The Study of Man (1959), Science, Faith, and Society (1964), and The Tacit Dimension (1966).

5 Without being aware of the international timing until preparing this short essay, I find that during the same period, the resistance against Structure from US philosophers of science had weakened to such an extent that in 1989, Kuhn would be elected president of the American Philosophy of Science Association.

6 In the nutshell, Fuller reads Structure as a smoke screen to hide the ugly Cold War science reality from its US readers and substitute a healthy tabletop history of science for it.

7 A few of them were university professors before becoming MoE directors, who were good friends and supportive of the social cause of STS.

8 We chose provoking titles for these two volumes: “Technoscience Longing for Society” 科技渴望社會for the first volume and “Technoscience Longing for Gender” 科技渴望性別 for the second.

9 A quick view of the authors of these classic papers shows the specific constitutions of Taiwan's STS networks before 2007: Thomas Hughes, Bruno Latour (two papers), David Edgerton (two papers), Langdon Winner, N. D. Jewson, David Arnold, Karin Garrety, Londa Schiebinger, Michel Foucault, Ruth Cowan, Sandra Harding, Emily Martin, Steven Epstein.

10 The first issue of STM was actually published in 2001, but because of difficulties that accompanied this new alliance and the new social and intellectual environment in the new-millennium Taiwan, the journal proceeded much more slowly than expected. From 2001 to 2006, STM published only three issues. It was not until Professor Chen Ruey-Lin and Professor Wang Wen-ji took charge of the journal in 2007 that it was revitalized, and it has published twelve issues in the past six years.

11 The first STS graduate institute in Taiwan, established in 2008. I have no space here to recount the birth of this exciting new institution or its present relationship with Structure.