Kuhnian Metascientific Ideology and Social Science

Abstract

Political scientists nowadays pay little if any attention to the writings of Thomas Kuhn or, for that matter, to of more generally. There was a period in the 1960s and 1970s when the discipline, due to widespread concern about its status as science, was preoccupied with of science. In the later phases of this preoccuption, political literature was awash with discussions of Kuhn’s work, and citations of Kuhn as an authority on the nature of science. These debates eventually died out, without clear or illuminating conclusions. Researchers simply grew sceptical about the relevance of of to their work, and lost interest. Whatever the issues at stake in debates about of science, they seemed highly abstract and far removed from actual research. Yet, Kuhn’s influence did not disappear along with overt discussion of his work. Kuhn had presented an interesting, convincing account of science, which was widely accepted, and filtered into the general background knowledge and methodological training literature of the social sciences. It may not be appropriate to call this kind of knowledge philosophy of science or metascience, would be more appropriate. Yet it is at this level that of can have its most significant influence. Just as political has its greatest impact through political ideology, so may metascientific ideology have a greater impact on the practice of political than the writings of philosophers of science. Kuhn's great contribution to the social sciences was to draw attention to the extra-scientific, extra-logical, and social aspects of science. Yet, the lesson implicit in his work is that it is futile and even counterproductive to argue about these aspects of science. In the advanced sciences, Kuhn taught, researchers do not challenge or argue about the dominant paradigm, they take it as given. This view discourages reflection and debate about the foundational aspects of science. It encourages a training or indoctrinational attitude toward methodological and other foundational questions rather than an inquisitive, imaginative, and argumentative one. It gives comfort to those who prefer to stick dogmatically to their fundamental assumptions, and ignore arguments critical of these assumptions. It subtly promotes fragmentation of disciplines into subfields dominated unquestioningly by different paradigms that are assumed to be “incommensurable.” This view obscures important lessons to be learned from the natural sciences, namely, that attempts to understand reality often involve imagination and tortuous debates about extra-scientific assumptions. The first part of this paper examines the rapid and enthusiastic acceptance of Kuhn's account of science, looking at why it was so attractive to political scientists of a wide variety of methodological persuasions. The second part suggests some negative implications of a Kuhnian view of for the social sciences. The third part shows how Kuhn's valuable insights into the extra-scientific foundations of can be integrated into an more adequate understanding of science.