Shouldn’t Thomas Kuhn Teach Us Humility?
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a true classic in the theory and history of science. In it, Thomas Kuhn argues that science progresses nonlinearly over time, with periods of stable, “normal” science interrupted by sudden shifts in paradigms. He sees the typical chronology as follows.
First, a set of truths or premises are established as a common foundation for a scientific field. By taking them for granted, scientists can work systematically within a common frame to add details and nuance to the basic theory. This is an incremental process that slowly and systematically covers slightly new ground with the methods and rigour defined by the paradigm.
Over time, however, the paradigm gets increasingly challenged by an accumulating set of paradoxes that it fails to explain. At first, these are given little attention, and attempts to examine them seriously are often met with hostility from the scientists operating within the paradigm. They are, after all, dependent on its validity.
At some point, the weight of the paradoxes becomes too heavy while a competing paradigm emerges. This causes the collapse of the old. The change is structural as opposed to the marginal progress driven by “normal” science within a paradigm.
Once the new paradigm is established, the process of normal science takes over once again to drive incremental developments—until, eventually, this paradigm is replaced by yet another one.
Paradigm shifts are structural breaks in the sense that they do not accept and build on the basic premises of what went before but offers new premises that invalidate the old ones. They pull the rug on the established paradigm and all the implications derived from it, and they ask the scientific profession to start over anew within a different frame.
Paradigm shifts are not just a remote possibility within any scientific field. Rather, they have occurred multiple times in the past and are therefore likely to occur again in the future. This should prompt reflection on the part those whose work depends on a prevailing paradigm—medical doctors, nutrition experts, physicists, organisational theorists, psychologists, biologists, and so on. Unless you believe that the current paradigm is the final one—a bold assertion, to be sure—you should expect all your claims to knowledge to become invalid at some point in the future.
Should knowing this—that scientific progress depends on discontinuous jumps that invalidate all that went before—not motivate a certain humility on the part of anyone who considers themself an expert in a field? While they may know many details of the current paradigm, those details are unlikely to remain eternally valid. It is probably just a matter of time until the current paradigm is turned over by a new one and remembered as one of those folly ideas of the past—an immature first attempt at knowledge but a wholly insufficient one at that.
I think it should. And yet I do not see this very often among professionals. Medical doctors, especially, tend to have an air of arrogance surrounding themselves and their field. They seem to believe that because they have studied the human body and its illnesses and treatments extensively within the current paradigm, their knowledge is timeless and valid.
They can accept the possibility of new discoveries within the paradigm—a new cancer treatment directed at certain genetic mutations or a diabetes drug that restores the proper level of insulin—but they reject outright any idea that make such discoveries irrelevant by challenging the existing paradigm—that mitochondrial dysfunction could be the common mechanism for all chronic disease, for example.
I can understand that, as the incumbent, you fear the new and the revolutionary since, by definition, it undermines the value of your knowledge. So, in the specific instance of being presented with a fundamentally new idea, I can understand and empathise with reluctance and hesitation. This is a fear-based response, and it makes sense.
What I cannot understand is the arrogance that comes along with it—the felt superiority and authority to reject new ideas that one has not examined closely. Does history, as Kuhn describes it, not tell us that some new idea is likely to be true and undermine everything we think we know today? Should this awareness not humble us in facing it? Would the optimal attitude not be: “This is an interesting possibility, far outside my worldview. I should like to understand it better”. Rather than: “This sounds absurd, so it must be”?