Chapter 27 - The Fourth Sin - Puzzle Solving and the Machine that goes "Ping"
Chapter 27 … The Fourth Sin: Puzzle-Solving and the Machine That Goes “Ping”
If the third sin was triviality dressed up as profundity, then Kuhn’s fourth sin is condescension dressed up as description. I refer here to his oft-quoted, oft-repeated, and, in my judgment, utterly vacuous metaphor: that science, in its “normal” phase, is nothing more than “puzzle-solving.”
Puzzle-Solving, Kuhn’s Favourite Metaphor
Kuhn declares that the activity of most working scientists is akin to puzzle-solving. They are not revolutionaries, not paradigm-shifters, but merely mechanics tinkering at the edges of a framework. They are, in his words, solving crosswords, Sudoku, Rubik’s Cubes — constrained games with rules already laid down, the answers already implicit in the structure.
At one level, this is trivially true. Scientists indeed spend their days designing apparatus, running tests, calibrating machines, analysing data, seeking to bring stubborn phenomena into line with theory. But at another level it is offensive, for it reduces the dignity of their work to the level of pastime. It equates the decades-long toil of a condensed-matter physicist with the idle puzzle-books one buys at an airport kiosk.
And Kuhn is not naïve. He knows the sting of the word. He deploys it knowingly, with a smirk in the prose, as if to say: “Look, you imagine scientists are Promethean, heroic discoverers, but really they are crossword-solvers.” It is a deflationary move, a rhetorical trick.
The Machine That Goes “Ping”
The condescension is heightened when Kuhn couples puzzle-solving with “elaborate-experimental-equipment-designing.” Here the scientist is cast as an engineer of fiddly devices, a constructor of baroque contraptions — and one cannot help but hear, behind his prose, the Monty Python sketch from The Meaning of Life: the hospital delivery room filled with machinery, the doctors fawning over the “machine that goes ‘Ping!’” while the mother is ignored.
This is how Kuhn frames normal science: a profession of puzzle-solvers tinkering with machines that go ping. It is not generous; it is not celebratory. It is faintly mocking, the laugh of the intellectual who has never held a pipette but feels entitled to belittle those who do.
The Rejoinder: Kuhn’s Own Puzzle
But here is the rejoinder: is Kuhn himself not merely “puzzle-solving”? His entire book is nothing more than an attempt to solve the puzzle of scientific revolutions. He gathers examples, he fits them into a schema, he wrestles with anomalies, he discards one hypothesis and embraces another. His knowledge-bank is itself an elaborate machine-of-the-mind, assembled piece by piece to solve his little “puzzle.”
In other words: Kuhn is guilty of the very thing he belittles. He sneers at the scientist for puzzle-solving, while himself being nothing more than a puzzle-solver in philosophy.
The irony is exquisite. The philosopher thinks himself superior to the scientist, but his labours are structurally identical. Both are puzzle-solvers. The difference is only in material: one works with apparatus and data, the other with books and metaphors. The logic is the same.
Puzzles Everywhere
Moreover, Kuhn’s metaphor is so elastic as to be meaningless. If science is puzzle-solving, then so is almost everything else. What shall we have for dinner tonight? That is a puzzle: given the contents of the pantry, the tastes of the family, and the constraints of time, what is the solution? Choosing a career is a puzzle: balancing opportunity, interest, income, and location. Choosing a spouse, buying a house, raising a child — each is a puzzle, with constraints, rules, and possible solutions.
The intensivist in the emergency ward, struggling to save the victim of a car accident, is puzzle-solving with machines that go ping. The lawyer in court, balancing precedent and statute, is puzzle-solving. The composer, trying to bring a fugue to resolution, is puzzle-solving. The chess grandmaster, obviously, is puzzle-solving.
In short, puzzle-solving is a universal feature of human activity. To label science as puzzle-solving is to say nothing distinctive at all. It is vacuity disguised as analysis.
Why Did Kuhn Do This?
Why, then, did Kuhn demean normal science with this label? Why did he choose a metaphor so belittling, so flattening, so universal as to be empty?
The charitable answer is that he wanted to draw attention to the rule-bound nature of normal science. In a crossword, the rules constrain the possibilities; so too in science, the reigning paradigm constrains the permissible questions. Fair enough. But Kuhn goes further: he suggests that scientists do nothing but this, that their lives are given over to crossword-solving, with little dignity or originality.
The uncharitable answer is that Kuhn enjoyed the deflation. He relished the sneer. His book is a work of rhetorical theatre, and the “puzzle-solving” trope is part of the performance.
The Patronising Tone
What makes this a sin is not merely the banality of the metaphor, but the patronising tone in which it is delivered. The working scientist, already underpaid, already drowning in grant applications, already labouring late into the night to calibrate a laser or purify a protein, opens Kuhn’s book and finds his life described as the solving of puzzles. The indignity is palpable.
Kuhn, the armchair philosopher, who never discovered oxygen or DNA, who never built a particle accelerator or sequenced a genome, presumes to tell those who do that they are puzzle-solvers. It is as though a man who has never played football were to describe Messi’s life’s work as “merely kicking a ball around.” The description is not false, but it is demeaning.
The Hidden Elitism
More deeply, Kuhn’s metaphor carries an elitist undertone. For if science is puzzle-solving, then only the revolutions — only the paradigm shifts — count as true discovery. Only the rare Einstein, overturning Newton, is worthy of admiration. The ordinary physicist, the laboratory worker, the field geologist, the bench biologist — they are puzzle-solvers, second-class citizens in the republic of knowledge.
But this is false. Science advances not only through revolutions but through the slow accumulation of detail, the refinement of methods, the dogged pursuit of anomalies. Most of what we know about nature comes from precisely the puzzle-solving Kuhn dismisses. To belittle normal science is to belittle the very foundation of knowledge.
Counter-Examples: The Glory of “Normal” Work
Let us look at some examples.
Gregor Mendel, in his monastery garden, spent years cross-pollinating peas. Was this puzzle-solving? Yes, in Kuhn’s sense. But it was also world-changing.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, scanning rolls of chart-recorder paper, noticed “scruff” in her radio telescope data and thereby discovered pulsars. Was this puzzle-solving? Yes, in Kuhn’s sense. But it was also an act of extraordinary observation.
The team at CERN who discovered the Higgs boson — were they puzzle-solving? Yes. They were building machines that go “ping”. But those machines, and that puzzle, revealed the fundamental structure of matter.
To describe these activities as puzzle-solving is like describing Beethoven as a “note-arranger.” It is not wrong, but it is grotesquely inadequate.
Philosophy as Puzzle-Solving
Finally, one must turn the weapon back upon Kuhn. If science is puzzle-solving, then so is philosophy. Is not Aristotle’s Metaphysics a solution to puzzles about substance and form? Is not Descartes’ Meditations a solution to puzzles about scepticism and certainty? Is not Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations a solution to puzzles about language and rule-following?
Philosophy, like science, is puzzle-solving. The only difference is that philosophers have fewer empirical constraints, which is why their puzzles multiply rather than resolve.
To sneer at science for being puzzle-solving is therefore hypocrisy. Kuhn is guilty of the very charge he levels. His own book is a puzzle, and he presents himself as a solver.
Conclusion: The Fourth Sin
Thus Kuhn’s fourth sin: the sin of condescension. He took the noble labour of scientists and reduced it to puzzle-solving. He mistook universality for insight, banality for depth. He mocked the apparatus, the machines that go ping, without which no discovery is possible.
And in doing so, he revealed his own blindness. For science is indeed puzzle-solving — but so is philosophy, so is art, so is life. The difference is that scientists’ puzzles save lives, feed nations, build bridges, cure diseases, and reveal the universe. Philosophers’ puzzles too often vanish into air.
To demean normal science as puzzle-solving is not only vacuous but patronising. It is the fourth sin of Thomas Kuhn.
Sin IV: The Patronising Puzzle
Introduction: From Respect to Trivialisation
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 1970) is rightly famous for introducing the world to the idea of paradigms, scientific revolutions, and incommensurability. Yet buried in the middle of the book, almost in passing, is an image that has perhaps done more than any other to shape how generations of readers think about science. Kuhn describes “normal science” as puzzle-solving.
On first encounter, this metaphor may strike one as benign, even witty: science is a matter of clever people solving crosswords with nature. But Kuhn doubles down. He insists that puzzle-solving is “precisely what engages most scientists throughout their careers” (SSR, p. 36). He contrasts “puzzles” with “discoveries”: the former are limited, bounded, and trivial; the latter, rare and revolutionary. By this stroke, science is recast as a humble, almost mechanical occupation, occasionally punctuated by upheavals.
It is here that Kuhn commits his fourth sin. By calling science “puzzle-solving,” he does not illuminate the practice—he trivialises it. He devalues the daily labor of scientists, framing their efforts as at once necessary yet demeaned, as though “mere puzzles” were not themselves the very fabric of human survival, flourishing, and knowledge.
Kuhn’s Own Words: Puzzle-Solving as Science
Let us allow Kuhn to speak for himself, so that our charge of trivialisation is not mistaken as exaggeration.
1. “Normal science is the research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.” (SSR, p. 10)
2. “Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none. New and unsuspected phenomena are, of course, repeatedly uncovered by scientific research, but they are not the goal of the enterprise.” (SSR, p. 52)
3. “Normal science, for the most part, is a highly cumulative enterprise, eminently successful in solving the puzzles it is designed to solve, but not aimed at fundamental novelties.” (SSR, p. 52)
4. “Puzzle-solving is what scientists do within a paradigm; it is an activity that resembles filling in the squares of a crossword puzzle.” (SSR, p. 36–37)
From these and other passages, it is plain that Kuhn deliberately chose this metaphor to mark science as limited, conservative, and unadventurous between revolutions. The sting of the sin lies not in the words themselves but in their tone: patronising, dismissive, and incommensurate with the realities of scientific labor.
The Human Cost of “Puzzles”: The Trauma Surgeon
Consider now the work of a trauma surgeon in an emergency room. The patient has been delivered by paramedics: multiple fractures, collapsed lung, internal bleeding. The operating theatre is a storm of activity—scalpels, retractors, blood units hung, suction tubes clearing the field, anaesthetist monitoring vitals second by second.
Each move the surgeon makes is provisional, adaptive, and uncertain. Should the collapsed lung be reinflated first, or should the abdominal bleed be controlled? Every second carries mortal consequence. The surgeon’s choices are guided not by a “puzzle” whose rules are fixed and whose solution is guaranteed, but by judgment under uncertainty, by life-and-death reasoning that unfolds in a maelstrom of unpredictability.
To call this “puzzle-solving” is not merely inadequate: it is insulting. It would enrage any physician, nurse, or family member to hear that the frantic, heroic labour of saving a life is comparable to filling in crossword squares. And yet, by Kuhn’s definition, this is exactly what “normal science” amounts to: the routine application of existing knowledge to bounded problems.
It is here that we must object—not only because the metaphor trivialises the depth of the work, but because it fails to respect the existential stakes of real-world scientific application.
Scholarly Critiques of the Puzzle Metaphor
It is not only critics like myself who find this metaphor demeaning. A number of philosophers of science have observed the same.
● William Goodwin, in Interpreting Kuhn: Critical Essays, stresses that describing normal science as “mop-up work” ignores the “imaginative, open-ended character of experimental design and conceptual refinement” that drives discovery. He calls Kuhn’s metaphor “a caricature of scientific labor.”
● Larry Laudan, one of Kuhn’s fiercest critics, argued that science must be understood as a continuous process of problem-solving within what he called “research traditions.” For Laudan, there is no sharp divide between puzzle-solving and revolution: all science involves grappling with problems, some larger than others. Kuhn’s “puzzle” metaphor, in Laudan’s view, misrepresents the richness and continuity of real inquiry.
● Imre Lakatos, though more sympathetic to Kuhn, similarly warned that Kuhn’s portrayal risks making science look “irrational or degenerative.” If all normal science is merely puzzle-solving, then the rational justification of theory choice becomes obscured, and science devolves into sociology.
● Contemporary scholars (e.g. Chang, Is Water H2O?, 2012) highlight how real scientific advances often emerge from what Kuhn would call “normal science.” For example, the determination of the freezing point of water, seemingly a trivial puzzle, actually revealed profound insights into purity, phase transitions, and the molecular theory of matter.
Thus, across decades of secondary scholarship, the critique is consistent: Kuhn’s puzzle metaphor trivialises the work of scientists and misrepresents the continuity of discovery.
The Trivialisation of Motivation
Kuhn’s description of puzzles as “the problems that can serve to test the ingenuity or skill in solution” (SSR, p. 36) further demeans scientists by suggesting their motives are merely to demonstrate cleverness within a closed system. But this is false to both history and experience. Scientists are not simply competitive crossword players; they are motivated by curiosity, by a desire to alleviate suffering, by ambition to change the world.
Take the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s: researchers laboured against immense odds to identify HIV, develop diagnostic tests, and design antiretroviral therapies. To portray their work as “solving puzzles” is to erase the urgency, the human devastation, the moral imperative that propelled their research.
The danger is that Kuhn’s metaphor encourages outsiders—philosophers, sociologists, postmodern critics—to adopt a patronising view of science as sterile, mechanical, unimaginative. The metaphor becomes a weapon to belittle, rather than illuminate.
The False Distinction Between Puzzle and Revolution
A deeper critique is that the puzzle metaphor reinforces Kuhn’s broader false dichotomy between “normal science” and “scientific revolution.” By trivialising the one, he magnifies the other. Yet historians of science repeatedly show that revolutionary advances often emerge gradually, from what Kuhn would call puzzle-solving.
● Darwin’s theory of evolution built slowly upon puzzle-solving in taxonomy, geology, and animal breeding.
● Crick and Watson’s model of DNA was the culmination of incremental X-ray crystallography and biochemical puzzle-solving.
● Modern oncology progresses by puzzle-solving in molecular pathways, protein folding, and drug design.
In each case, the “puzzle” was not trivial: it was the gateway to the revolution. Kuhn’s metaphor blinds us to this continuity.
Conclusion: The Patronising Sin
To describe science as puzzle-solving may have been intended by Kuhn as a witty simplification, a teaching metaphor. Yet its effect is pernicious. It demeans the scientist, trivialises the labor, and distorts the history. It fuels postmodern critiques that seize upon “puzzles” to reduce science to mere gamesmanship. And worst of all, it ignores the blood and sweat of those whose puzzle-solving literally means the difference between life and death.
As one critic observed, “If science is puzzle-solving, then the puzzles are written in blood, in bone, and in the fragile filaments of human life.”
That is why this, Kuhn’s fourth sin, remains among the most damning.
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