Consolations for the specialist

Abstract

‘I have been hanging people for years, but I have never had all this fuss before.’ (Remark made by Edward ‘Lofty’ Milton, Rhodesia's part time executioner on the occasion of demonstrations against the death penalty.) ‘He was’ – says Time magazine (15 March 1968) – ‘professionally incapable of understanding the commotion’. INTRODUCTION In the years 1960 and 1961 when Kuhn was a member of the philosophy department at the University of California in Berkeley I had the good fortune of being able to discuss with him various aspects of science. I have profited enormously from these discussions and I have looked at science in a new way ever since. Yet while I thought I recognized Kuhn's problems ; and while I tried to account for certain aspects of science to which he had drawn attention (the omnipresence of anomalies is one example); I was quite unable to agree with the theory of science which he himself proposed; and I was even less prepared to accept the general ideology which I thought formed the background of his thinking. This ideology, so it seemed to me, could only give comfort to the most narrowminded and the most conceited kind of specialism. It would tend to inhibit the advancement of knowledge. And it is bound to increase the anti-humanitarian tendencies which are such a disquieting feature of much of post-Newtonian science (cf. ch. 2). On all these points my discussions with Kuhn remained inconclusive.

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