Chapter 24 - The First Sin - Against Textbooks
Chapter 24 … The First Sin … Against Textbooks
To begin
Do you know what a textbook is? Does anybody?
Did Kuhn?
late 14c., "the wording of anything written," from Old French texte, Old North French tixte "text, book; Gospels" (12c.), from Medieval Latin textus "the Scriptures; a text, a treatise," earlier, in Late Latin "written account, content, characters used in a document," from Latin textus "style or texture of a work," etymologically "thing woven," from past-participle stem of texere "to weave, to join, fit together, braid, interweave, construct, fabricate, build" (from PIE root *teks- "to weave, to fabricate, to make; make wicker or wattle framework").
A Problem Kuhn Invented
Thomas Kuhn begins The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by striking an accusation, within the very first sentences of his Introduction, against ... the science textbook.
As a journalist and editor of The Crimson at Harvard, Kuhn would have learnt that a story needs a hook early on, and he would have learnt that conflict sells, and uncovering secrets sells.
So here he is, attacking a major pedagogic instrument via which most scientists initially learn their science: through their textbooks.
Kuhn begins his "Structure ..." with a swift de-structure of textbooks, of the very books through which he got the PhD that launched his career, and thus begins with a swift knee in the kahunas of his former teachers and colleagues.
Trouble is, *he offers no direct evidence* to support his accusations, ... so he accuses by innuendo and tangential inference (a good lawyer he would *not* have made).
He writes ""the aim of such books is persuasive and pedagogic; a concept of science drawn from them is no more likely to fit the enterprise that produced them than an image of a national culture drawn from a tourist brochure or a language text. This essay attempts to show that we have been misled by them in fundamental ways.'
Ouch.
Kuhn then asserts he'll teach us something new, but that his new concept won't be found in "the unhistorical stereotype drawn from science texts.Those texts have, for example, often seemed to imply that the content of science is uniquely exemplified by the observations, laws, and theories described in their pages. Almost as regularly, the same books have been read as saying that scientific methods are simply the ones illustrated by the manipulative techniques used in gathering textbook data, together with the logical operations employed when relating those data to the textbook's theoretic generalisations."
Evidence offered?
None.
But those who know propaganda see the tricks here.
The "tourist brochure" reference is obvious hyperbole, and identifies this book, right from the start, as polemical rather that dispassionately academic.
And Kuhn does not identify "the enterprise" nor in any sense identify the purpose of the textbooks he accuses.
He accuses textbooks of being misleading, without identifying where textbooks *should* lead, in his view.
Interestingly, it never seems to occur to him that
(a) tourist brochures have a purpose,
(b) no same person imagines a tourist brochure yields a total 100% 3-D re-enactment of a 14-day European holiday including tiny rooms, thin blankets, toilet breaks, stale bread rolls and rude quips from French waiters pretending to not understand English, and
(c) because sane people know what a tourist brochure is, and its purpose, and know what a national culture is, they are *never* "misled" by tourist brochures into thinking they represent the totality of a national culture.
Phrases like "often seem to imply" and "have been read as saying that" are used when a writer *has no evidence* to support their accusation.
What Kuhn is building here are *strawman arguments*....
that textbooks "often seem to imply" they or science is "unique", so that Kuhn can later demolish this idea of "uniqueness" .... but where is the actual claim to uniqueness? Nowhere.
Again, the books "have been read as saying" something .... but do they actually *say* it? Kuhn offers no evidence. I know of no such example. But again by innuendo Kuhn builds an accusative case he can later punish.
...
A few pages later, Kuhn begins his next misinterpretation of textbooks.
Now he paints science textbooks as if they are corporate constitutions: defining "membership" of the "community" of "practitioners" - all of which suggesting, btw, that Kuhn never seriously practised as a scientist.
For, let me explain: textbooks define no such thing. Kuhn confuses cart with horse.
"Membership", if there is such a thing, of a scientific "community", if there is such a thing, is associated with multiple processes and pathways, but only an undergraduate, or a recent graduate, would imagine the undergraduate document known as the "textbook" plays a major role.
University positions, journal publishing, plain old public demonstrations of experimental success: scientific recognition its a cosmopolitan affair.
Mature scientists know this ... while someone who renounced their science career as soon as getting their PhD might not have had the maturity to realise this.
And many have been the advances in science that did not conform with Kuhn's formula stated here.
...
Twenty-odd pages later, Kuhn describes scientists as people who "learn" their "trade" from textbooks, and then, having done so, Kuhn claims scientists then again search their text books for anomalies and uncertainties that offer opportunities for research. And, again, I can imagine an undergraduate believing that. But ... newsflash ... mature scientists don't give two hoots about textbooks, because textbooks are *always out of date*.
Example. "A System of Practical Surgery" by Sir William Fergusson was a global standard surgical text in the 19th century. The fourth edition, in 1853, reported the most momentous advance in the history of surgery: the development of "anaesthesia". Fergusson spent 8 pages describing the story of ether, then chloroform, bringing painlessness to surgery. Fantastic - but that had occurred back in 1846. Clearly, Fergusson's *previous* edition, his third, in 1846, did not catch it, and any *practising scientist* relying on Fergusson's to guide *current research* would have been long out of date buy the time of reading it, even as it came from the printers, for *Textbook production is too slow to guide current research*.
Aside from some unproductive war-work on radar, and aside from being nursed through a PhD, Kuhn didn't do science research. Frankly, he writes without the authority of science experience. Only those ignorant of science would be fooled by his chutzpah.
....
Kuhn devotes his entire Chapter XI to supporting the notion that science textbooks are "systematically misleading" in their portrayal of science's history, that they fail to record faithfully the means by which science develops. Regarding the "revolutions" Kuhn describes (variably) as occurring rarely, or frequently, in science, he writes science textbooks "inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them". Who knew?
Accusingly, he writes "Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist's sense of his discipline's history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter or, more often, in scattered references to the great heroes of an earlier age."
But what Kuhn fails to appreciate is that practising scientists are not learning from textbooks if the scientists are of substance. They are *writing* textbooks. And if a given scientist is a person of any curiosity at all, that scientist will *read further* than an undergraduate textbook in order to learn about the history of the craft. Kuhn seems to imagine his archetypic scientist simply rote learnt *one* textbook and never imagined to look beyond that for his entire career - never reading a journal, never attending a library, never becoming involved in a professional association, never teaching (as Kuhn himself did), never questioning, never wondering.
I've known many scientists ... many who published far more "science" than Kuhn ever did, but I have never met one as singularly incurious as the archetype Kuhn refers to, repeatedly, in SSR.
What we are left then, in Kuhn's accusations against the structure of the science textbook, are the following
a) Kuhn is disappointed that science textbooks do not conform to what he would like them to be - but to meet Kuhn's requirements would have made them *entirely unsuitable* for their *stated purpose*: to teach undergraduates the basic canons of science, and to aid teachers who teach the basis canons of science.
One recalls Groucho Marx's famous quip that he would never stoop to join any club that would stoop to accepting him as a member, to suggest Kuhn the undergraduate would *never* have had the time to study the only sort of science textbook Kuhn the philosopher would have thought adequate to study.
In today's parlance: the "history" part of a science textbook is not a "bug": it's a "feature".
b) Kuhn variously accuses textbooks, and thus their writers, of being misleading, of disguising his "revolutions", of truncating history, of defining the extent of the discipline, of being akin to a political manifesto of belief or religious creed, of triumphalism, of defining craft membership. All of which implies malfeasance and ulterior motivation. All of which he claims without evidence of ill-will. All of which he peculiarly infers from reading innocent science textbooks in the least charitable manner he can imagine
c) By implication, Kuhn accuses his fellow scientists (virtually *all* of whom proceeded to do far more science than Kuhn ever did) of being singularly incurious and easily misled about the history of the profession to which they devote their lives, far more than Kuhn ever did.
d) Kuhn claims for the science textbook a role within the scientific profession that science textbook writers themselves do not claim, science students do not seek, and is foreign to actual scientists.
e) Thus Kuhn seeks a role for science textbooks quite at variance with their design. It is as if Kuhn had purchased a screwdriver, attempted to use it to chop wood, then complained the screwdriver functioned poorly as an axe.
It seems likely that the peculiarity of Kuhn personal musings about science textbooks went so largely unchallenged because so many of his students, and those who have since applauded his work, have been non-scientists and have been quite unfamiliar with science.
.....
As his students and his audience heard or read his remarks about science textbooks, one wonders as to what they thought of their *own* textbooks on matters other than science.
Kuhn makes many accusative statements about science textbooks - but what about *other* textbooks?
Upon opening textbooks of history, of geography, of Greek or Latin, of grammar, of logic, of rhetoric, of economics, of politics, and indeed of philosophy itself, what do we find?
Precisely the same features Kuhn finds so objectionable in science textbooks.
Every other textbook truncates history: even history textbooks (aside from Churchill's History of the Second World War ... running as it did to six volumes I am happy to call it un-truncated ... but any *other* account of WWII is necessarily truncated by comparison).
Every other textbook skips over the processes by which the discipline develops: the average textbook of the French language designed for Anglophones has the temerity *not* to explain the Latin etymology of each French word but rather merely teach the current French language, mon Dieu!
Every textbook of Philosophy (gasp) is similarly negligent by the principles of textbook writing laid out by Kuhn.
And indeed so is Kuhn's own book: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The preface itself apologises that the book is so brief , and thus "truncated", and Kuhn promises to write a more comprehensive version in future ... something over the remaining 34 years of his life he *never* managed to complete.
So there it is. Kuhn would never approve of any textbook written by ... Kuhn.
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