Chapter 25 - The Second Sin - Against Scientists' Humanity
Chapter 25 … The Second Sin … Against Scientists’ Humanity
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892
Having dispatched Kuhn’s first sin — his banal and misleading attack on science textbooks — we turn to his second sin, which is no less embarrassing for a thinker so often lionized.
If the first sin was the reduction of textbooks to propaganda, the second is the equally naive discovery that scientists are human.
That is to say: they have pride; they become attached to their own ideas; they dislike being proven wrong; they are sometimes stubborn, sometimes jealous, occasionally petty, often ambitious.
To which the obvious response is: yes, and so what?
This is neither a revelation nor even a noteworthy observation. It is the most trivial of truisms. Scientists are human in precisely the same way that engineers, architects, bakers, and bank managers are human. They are no more angelic than priests, no more devilish than lawyers, no more obstinate than politicians. To devote pages of a supposedly pathbreaking treatise to this commonplace is not philosophy but filler. Yet in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR), Kuhn writes as though he has unearthed some great hidden fact that will forever change the way we understand science.
The problem is not simply that the claim is trivial, but that Kuhn treats it as though it were both novel and devastating. He writes as though the history of science prior to 1962 had assumed scientists to be infallible demigods, and as though he alone had pulled back the curtain to reveal the fragile, flawed human beings behind the equations. That is historically false, philosophically lazy, and rhetorically manipulative. It is, in short, Kuhn’s second sin.
The Banality of the Claim
Consider the thesis at its simplest: “Scientists are human.” Did any serious scientist in the history of the profession doubt this? Did Newton think himself infallible? Did Darwin imagine he was free of bias? Did Einstein believe himself immune to error? On the contrary: the historical record is overflowing with scientists publicly acknowledging the limits of their knowledge, the inevitability of error, and the difficulty of overcoming personal prejudice.
Newton’s famous remark that he felt like a boy playing on the seashore while “the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me” is not the statement of a man convinced of his own infallibility. Darwin’s correspondence is littered with agonized doubts, reversals, and admissions of ignorance. Sir William Osler, pioneer of medical bedside education, spent his career warning students of medicine against arrogance, urging them instead to cultivate humility before the complexity of nature.
Even as institutions, the sciences have long enshrined skepticism about authority. The Royal Society’s motto, Nullius in verba — “Take nobody’s word for it” — was adopted in 1660, three centuries before Kuhn’s book, precisely to remind its members that neither pride nor tradition was sufficient warrant for truth. And if the practice of “normal science” were truly the slavish “tradition-following” that Kuhn describes, how are we to explain the boldness of that motto, which elevates independence above all?
Kuhn’s “discovery” is thus banal in the extreme. It is not only common sense but common knowledge, among scientists and historians alike. What is worse, it is the kind of insight that appears profound only to the naive. One can imagine a first-year undergraduate, fresh from high school chemistry, being surprised to learn that Newton and Leibniz bickered like schoolboys over priority in inventing the calculus. But to parade this before a scholarly audience as a major thesis is insulting. It is as though one were to announce, with solemn gravity, that politicians sometimes lie, or that generals sometimes enjoy war. True, no doubt. But hardly profound.
Historical Evidence: Scientists Always Knew They Were Human
If further proof were needed, the history of science itself provides endless examples.
The Royal Society, from its inception, was riven with disputes over membership, scope, finances, and prestige. Even its most eminent leaders were not above petty quarrels. Newton, as president, shamelessly used his position to assert primacy over Leibniz in the calculus controversy, conducting a campaign of behind-the-scenes influence that would embarrass a modern politician. All very human, all very unsurprising.
Nor are such episodes confined to the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth, Lord Kelvin’s opposition to geological and evolutionary timescales was stubborn, dogmatic, and increasingly untenable in light of new evidence. In the twentieth, Einstein’s resistance to quantum mechanics — “God does not play dice” — is the very archetype of a great mind reluctant to abandon a cherished vision. In each case, the scientist in question knew perfectly well that bias and prejudice were real risks. Their colleagues knew it too. The community as a whole did not need Kuhn’s intervention to remind them.
Indeed, the very discipline of the history of science, which Kuhn pretends to be re-founding, had long since documented these episodes. From Whewell in the nineteenth century to Merton in the twentieth, the frailties of scientists were well understood and openly discussed. Kuhn was not the first to notice, only the first to present the fact as if it were news.
Re-Reading Kuhn’s Passages
Let us look more closely at what Kuhn actually writes.
“An apparently arbitrary element, compounded by personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time.”
What is this but the truism that people are influenced by their circumstances? One might say the same of poets, priests, and plumbers. That scientists are no exception is unremarkable.
Or again: “When examining normal science in Sections III, IV, and V, we shall want finally to describe that research as a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education.”
Here Kuhn indulges in loaded rhetoric. To “force nature into conceptual boxes” is to suggest an act of violence, even dishonesty. Yet every discipline has its paradigms, frameworks, and vocabularies. Historians interpret documents through lenses of political, economic, or cultural analysis; philosophers read texts through the categories of metaphysics or ethics. To say that scientists work within frameworks is to say nothing more than that they are professionals trained in a discipline. It is not an accusation but a truism.
Again: “Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.”
But does philosophy not do the same? How quickly were Schopenhauer’s insights dismissed by the Hegelian establishment of his day. How scornfully was Kierkegaard treated by his contemporaries. How often are young philosophers today warned not to pursue topics that will not find favour with journals or tenure committees. By Kuhn’s logic, the humanities are as guilty as science, if not more so. Yet he reserves his fire for the sciences, leaving his own discipline untouched. This is not analysis but special pleading.
You might have heard this joke:
Two friends are in the woods, having a picnic. They spot a bear running at them. One friend gets up and starts running away from the bear. The other friend opens his backpack, takes out his running shoes, changes out of his hiking boots, and starts stretching.
“Are you crazy?” the first friend shouts, looking over his shoulder as the bear closes in on his friend. “You can’t outrun a bear!”
“I don’t have to outrun the bear,” said the second friend. “I only have to outrun you.”
The bear, here, is ignorance.
And throughout Humanity's journey on this planet, "ignorance" has meant poverty, hunger, pain, injury, illness, and early death.
Science, on behalf of us all, puts on its running shoes.
Kuhn's philosophy reminds Science that it cannot outrun the bear.
The Humanities Mirror
And here we come to the most damning point. If Kuhn’s criticisms of science textbooks and scientific practice are valid, then they apply even more strongly to the humanities themselves. For what are textbooks of philosophy, of history, of literature, of politics, of sociology, if not codifications of tradition, simplifications of narrative, and selections of “approved” voices?
If Newton is not to be said to “stand on the shoulders of giants,” because he merely “saw differently” than his predecessors, then why should Kant be said to see further than Descartes, or Nietzsche to transcend Schopenhauer? The very idea of intellectual progress, of philosophy as building upon philosophy, collapses under Kuhn’s relativism.
Kuhn cannot have it both ways. If the sciences are guilty of textbook simplification, then so are the humanities. If scientists are merely human, then so are philosophers. If “normal science” suppresses novelty, then so does “normal philosophy.” Indeed, the humanities, lacking the discipline of experiment, are even more prone to dogma and tradition-worship. Their peer review processes are often more opaque, their gatekeeping more severe, their traditions more entrenched.
It is therefore ironic to the point of absurdity that Kuhn, writing as a philosopher, should accuse science of precisely the sins that philosophy itself commits with greater frequency. It is the pot calling the kettle black. Worse: it is the kettle calling the pot black while insisting that its own soot is a mark of nobility.
The Irony of Selectivity
The irony deepens. For scientists, unlike philosophers, have continually built into their institutions mechanisms for correction. The replication of experiments, the insistence on falsifiability, the demand for empirical evidence — these are disciplines precisely designed to overcome human frailty.
Philosophy has no such mechanisms. A false argument can persist for centuries, protected by tradition, style, or institutional inertia. Theology, politics, and sociology are no better. That science nevertheless advances, while philosophy so often circles in place, is proof that scientists have always known their humanity and worked to discipline it. Kuhn’s charge that they are merely human is therefore not merely banal but misdirected. He criticizes the one field that has already confronted the problem most effectively, while giving his own field a free pass.
Conclusion: A Non-Discovery Dressed as Profundity
Thus Kuhn’s second sin. He announces, as though it were a revelation, that scientists are human. But scientists knew it; historians knew it; philosophers knew it. The claim is trivial, banal, and already accounted for in the very structures of science itself. Worse, Kuhn applies his criticism selectively, sparing philosophy the same scrutiny, though it is even more guilty of the charges he levels.
The result is a distortion, a misrepresentation of science dressed up as profundity. It is not philosophy but rhetoric, not history but caricature. And in advancing this caricature, Kuhn laid the groundwork for a generation of sloppy relativism, in which the obvious is mistaken for the profound, the trivial for the devastating, the banal for the revolutionary.
This is why Structure must be resisted, and Kuhn’s reputation subjected to the scrutiny he himself so carelessly evaded. His second sin is not merely an error. It is a symptom of a deeper intellectual dishonesty: the elevation of truism into theory, of cliché into doctrine. And it is a sin for which his admirers, as much as Kuhn himself, must be held to account.
Sin II: The Triviality of Discovering that Scientists Are Human
Introduction
If the first sin of Thomas Kuhn lay in his distortion of the role of textbooks, the second is a different kind of misstep: the transformation of the obvious into the profound. Kuhn devotes considerable space in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) to insisting that scientists are not abstract reasoning-machines but human beings—swayed by passion, prejudice, ambition, loyalty, and habit.
But who ever doubted it?
Kuhn presents this as if he has pulled back the curtain on some naïve myth of scientific rationality. In fact, what he provides is little more than a sociological truism, elevated into supposed philosophy. Worse, by dressing this truism as though it were revelation, Kuhn simultaneously trivialises science’s real achievements and hands ammunition to its critics.
Kuhn’s Statements on the Humanity of Scientists
A few representative passages from SSR make the point.
● “The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other. But that comparison is not and cannot be made in the manner that the philosophers of science have traditionally supposed.” (SSR, 2nd ed., p. 77)
● “Like the choice between competing political institutions, that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life.” (SSR, p. 94)
● “The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced.” (SSR, p. 151)
● “Scientists are not, of course, completely objective. Their judgments are influenced by idiosyncrasies of autobiography and personality.” (SSR, p. 4)
Here Kuhn insists: scientists are swayed by autobiography, by community, by conversion-like experiences. But in doing so he is saying little more than: scientists are human beings, living in groups, making decisions under conditions of uncertainty.
Why This is Banality, Not Profundity
It is difficult to understand what Kuhn thought he was revealing. Did Newton not know that he was human? Did Darwin or Faraday or Einstein ever claim to be otherwise?
Francis Bacon, centuries before Kuhn, warned of the Idola tribus—the “idols of the tribe,” the biases of the human species that distort judgment. Darwin in his Autobiography confessed that he was prone to bias and compensated by deliberately writing down contrary facts. Even in popular culture, the archetype of the eccentric, flawed, fallible scientist was firmly established long before 1962.
To present this truism as a revelation is, therefore, banal.
The Real Achievement Kuhn Overlooks
What is extraordinary about science is not that it is conducted by human beings, but that it has developed powerful methods to counteract human frailty:
● Replication: Experiments are repeated by others precisely because the first scientist may have been biased or mistaken.
● Peer Review: Journals and professional societies arose to provide communal checks on individual error.
● Methodological Norms: Robert Merton described the guiding principles of science—communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, organised scepticism—as explicit safeguards against bias.
In other words, the humanity of scientists was never a hidden secret. It was a problem science itself openly acknowledged and systematically addressed.
The Consequences of Kuhn’s Framing
By presenting the humanity of scientists as though it undermined rationality, Kuhn committed a double disservice:
1. He trivialised science’s achievement. The central wonder of science is that it has found ways to correct for human bias. Kuhn diminishes this by focusing instead on the bias itself.
2. He armed science’s critics. Postmodernists seized on his language to argue that science is mere “tribal allegiance” or “conversion.”
3. He insulted working scientists. To reduce years of careful experimental refinement to “idiosyncrasies of personality” is patronising.
Secondary Scholarship on Sin II
Kuhn’s critics were quick to notice the triviality and danger of this line.
● Steven Weinberg remarked: “Of course scientists are human, but the whole point of science is that it works despite that humanity” (Dreams of a Final Theory, 1992).
● Imre Lakatos accused Kuhn of collapsing philosophy into mere sociology: “Instead of rational reconstruction we are offered anthropological description” (Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, 1970).
● Larry Laudan called Kuhn’s claim “trivial at best, corrosive at worst.”
● Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont noted in Fashionable Nonsense (1997) that Kuhn’s language invited the relativists’ favourite trope: “science is just another narrative.”
In other words: everyone agrees scientists are human. But only Kuhn thought this worth building a revolution upon.
A Different Illustration: The Chess Grandmaster
To keep the imagery sharp, let us borrow a metaphor other than medicine (reserved for Sin IV).
Consider the chess grandmaster. He is human, prone to fatigue, nerves, and error. Does this mean his victories are meaningless, that chess is nothing but tribal allegiance? Of course not. His humanity makes his achievement more remarkable, not less.
The same is true of science. That fallible humans have devised systematic means of grasping the structure of nature is not diminished but magnified by the recognition of their humanity.
Conclusion
Thus Kuhn’s second sin is clear: he mistakes the obvious for the profound. Yes, scientists are human. But the real story of science is not this banality; it is the extraordinary edifice of methods and norms built to overcome that humanity.
By presenting the trivial as if it were revelatory, Kuhn misleads both his admirers and his critics. And in doing so, he commits a sin not of error but of banality.
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