Chapter 28 - The Fifth Sin - The False Dichotomy of Big and Small Ideas
Chapter 28 … Kuhn’s Fifth Sin: The False Dichotomy of Big and Small Ideas
Some ideas are small, and some ideas are big. That is the truism at the core of Kuhn’s supposed revolution. His really big, really “epoch-making” idea in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is, in fact, wholly unremarkable: that some intellectual advances are minor and incremental, while others are more sweeping and transformative. To dress this up as though it were a deep new insight into the nature of science is one of Kuhn’s more serious intellectual sins.
To avoid entangling ourselves in the semantic knots Kuhn enjoys — the tortured debates over “discoveries,” “inventions,” “normal science,” “paradigms” — I shall use a single, less compromised word: reconceptualisation. Every act of scientific advance, whether modest or monumental, involves a reconceptualisation of some part of our understanding. Some are small, some large, some middling, and all somewhere along a continuum. This framing immediately dissolves much of Kuhn’s drama, because it shows his grand dichotomies to be contrived.
Afferent and efferent reconceptualisation
Kuhn was fond of worrying over whether oxygen was “discovered” by Lavoisier or “invented.” He thought this paradoxical, but it need not be. The paradox is of his own contrivance.
Let us instead think more carefully. A discovery might be considered an afferentreconceptualisation — one in which the conceptual scheme is reshaped by input from outside, by data, by nature’s resistance to our previous models. An invention, by contrast, may be called an efferent reconceptualisation — a projection outward from within, an imaginative construct, a new model or device born of the mind’s creative activity. But, importantly, every reconceptualisation contains elements of both. Lavoisier’s “oxygen” reconceptualisation was neither purely afferent nor purely efferent. He was reacting to experimental results, but also projecting a new theoretical framework. The distinction collapses under scrutiny.
For example, hand a five-year-old child a toy. The child “discovers” the toy upon seeing it. That is afferent. Yet the child knows nothing about it. Only through pushing, pulling, breaking, testing — in short, through invention — does the child form an internal concept of what the toy is and what can be done with it. Discovery and invention interdigitate, reiterate, reinforcing each other. So too in science. To frame them as an opposition is to indulge in sophistry.
The continuum of reconceptualisations
And once this false dichotomy has been dissolved, Kuhn’s larger error becomes clear. Reconceptualisations can be big, small, or anywhere in between. They exist along a spectrum. There is no clean line separating “normal science” from “paradigm shift.” There is no purity in small reconceptualisations being “merely” normal science, nor in large reconceptualisations being “true” revolutions.
Kuhn here commits the same gross oversimplification of which he accuses science textbooks. He rails against textbooks for presenting a too-tidy, too-linear story of scientific development, erasing the detours, debates, and dead ends. Yet his own grand opposition between normal science and revolutionary science is a “textbook” (excuse me) simplification of the worst kind. His dichotomy imposes an artificial clarity on what is in reality a messy gradation.
The banal truth: scientists make small and large moves
Consider Kuhn’s metaphor of “normal science” as colouring-in a colouring book. According to him, normal scientists do not question the outline of the drawing; they merely fill in the details. From time to time, however, someone tears up the old picture and replaces it with a new one: that is the paradigm shift. This is vivid but misleading. For in reality, even in the most “normal” work, there are continual micro-shifts in micro-paradigms, small reconceptualisations. It is never just “colouring in”. And in even the grandest “revolutions,” continuity persists. The new picture, in crucial respects, resembles the old.
Take medicine. Every week, new drugs, new devices, new diagnostic techniques appear. Are these “normal science” or “revolutions”? Both and neither. They involve small reconceptualisations — sometimes accumulating into larger ones — but rarely a clean rupture. The invention of antibiotics, the discovery of the structure of DNA, the sequencing of the human genome: each involved continuities as well as novelties. They are not neatly placed into Kuhn’s boxes.
The Copernican example and its limits
Kuhn’s favourite example was the Copernican Revolution. Out went Ptolemy’s geocentric system, in came Copernicus’s heliocentric model. A total rupture, says Kuhn. But was it? Under both paradigms, we are talking about large heavenly bodies moving in circles (or, later, ellipses, for Copernicus thought in circles). The continuity is obvious. To call this an “absolute reconceptualisation” is hyperbole.
Indeed, if Kuhn were consistent, he would have to admit that what he calls paradigm shifts are themselves only partial reconceptualisations. A literal 100% reconceptualisation would mean no overlap at all between old and new — a complete obliteration of all prior concepts. But that has never occurred. Even Einstein’s physics retained Newton’s as an approximation. Even quantum mechanics preserves classical mechanics across the vast majority of human experiences. Kuhn’s revolutions are, in reality, partial reconfigurations along a spectrum of magnitude.
The Newton–Einstein case
Kuhn seems dimly aware of this weakness, for when he turns to Newton and Einstein, he is forced into rhetorical contortions. He insists that Newtonian dynamics applies only at “small velocities” compared to light.
But what does “small” mean here?
Well, let’s compare, with numbers, a Newtonian description of the movement of the Moon versus an Einsteinian description.
Let’s put some meat on the bones of this discussion.
The Moon orbits the Earth at close to 1km/second or 3600km/h, and at that speed Newton’s equations are 99.999999998% accurate, meaning that over the course of one month Newton’s equations miscalculate the duration of one orbit of the Moon around the Earth by: about 35 *microseconds*, or 1/30,000th of a second, as compared to Einstein’s efforts.
This is the sort of difference Kuhn is talking about when he writes:
“What formerly appeared as the complete domain of Newtonian mechanics now comes to be seen as a limiting case… Newton’s laws are valid only in a range of phenomena, those involving bodies moving at low velocities and not too great masses.”
Low velocites … like a kilometre a second
Not too great masses … like the Moon
Newton is inaccurate … by less than a millisecond per year
This is not incommensurability; it is near-perfect continuity.
Yet Kuhn needs to exaggerate the rupture, because his framework demands it.
Here, Kuhn bends the facts to fit his paradigm, precisely as he accuses scientists of doing. He wants Einstein and Newton to be utterly incommensurate, because otherwise his distinction between normal and revolutionary science collapses. He must therefore exaggerate their difference, even when every working physicist knows the continuity is overwhelming.
Continuity disguised as rupture
The case of Watson and Crick makes this even clearer. When they proposed the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, biology underwent what was arguably its greatest twentieth-century transformation. But was it “incommensurable” with Mendelian genetics? Of course not. It provided the molecular mechanism that explained Mendel’s laws. It was integration, not rupture. It was a reconceptualisation of enormous magnitude, yes, but one that preserved and extended prior understanding.
This is why the dichotomy between “normal science” and “revolutionary science” is so damaging. It blinds us to the subtle interplay between continuity and change. It exaggerates the drama, distorts the history, and misleads both philosophers and scientists.
The real pattern: a spectrum, not a split
The reality is simpler, but also subtler. Reconceptualisations vary in size. Some are tiny, ephemeral, almost invisible — like Kuhn’s own contributions to physics, which were of brief interest to only a handful of specialists. Others are vast, reshaping entire disciplines. Most fall somewhere in between. But there is no magic line, no sharp divide. The growth of science is more like a Richter scale of reconceptualisation magnitudes: logarithmic, continuous, without clean boundaries.
This image better captures the reality of scientific development. A small reconceptualisation might be like a minor tremor — felt only by specialists. A large one might be like an earthquake that reshapes the intellectual landscape. But they are of one kind, not two. There is no absolute rupture, no pure incommensurability, no need for Kuhn’s melodramatic categories.
Mandelbrot and the coastline of Britain
For a more playful illustration, consider Benoit Mandelbrot’s famous question: how long is the coastline of Britain? The answer depends on the scale of measurement. At one level, it is two weeks of sailing; at another, it is fifty trillion angstroms. The lesson is that scale matters. Reconceptualisations, too, vary by scale. At one magnification, a change looks revolutionary; at another, it is continuous. Kuhn’s mistake was to absolutise one perspective and ignore the other.
Why Kuhn’s exaggeration appealed
Why, then, was Kuhn’s false dichotomy so seductive? Partly because of its rhetorical power. The image of science alternating between calm puzzle-solving and violent revolution is vivid. It makes history exciting. It sells books. But it is not an accurate account of how science actually proceeds. Scientists themselves know this, which is why many of them found Kuhn’s claims irritating or trivial. They already knew that some advances were larger than others. They did not need a philosopher to tell them that.
The appeal was strongest among non-scientists: sociologists, historians, cultural critics. For them, Kuhn’s model provided a convenient tool with which to undermine the authority of science. If science itself is just a series of shifting paradigms, with no objective progress, then its authority is weakened. Kuhn himself resisted this more radical relativism, but his framework lent itself to it. His fixation on absolute incommensurability was, in part, an attempt to keep his dichotomy intact while fending off more extreme conclusions.
The consequence: a miseducation
The result has been unfortunate. Generations of students have been taught that science is divided into “normal” and “revolutionary” phases, that paradigm shifts are absolute breaks, that incommensurability rules. They have been taught to think in false dichotomies. They have been miseducated into believing that continuity and gradual reconceptualisation are of little importance. This is Kuhn’s fifth sin: to turn a banal observation — that some ideas are bigger than others — into a dogmatic and distorting dichotomy.
A more honest account
A more honest philosophy of science would start from the following premises:
1. Every advance is a reconceptualisation. Discovery and invention are intertwined in every case.
2. Reconceptualisations vary in magnitude. There is a continuum, not a dichotomy.
3. Continuity and rupture coexist. Every large reconceptualisation preserves elements of what came before.
4. Progress is real. Newton was not simply “incommensurate” with Einstein; he was astoundingly accurate within all humanly measurable parameters at the time.
5. History is nuanced. The neat categories Kuhn imposed flatten and distort the complexity of actual scientific practice.
Such a framework would not make for such dramatic prose, but it would be more faithful to science and more useful to those who actually do it.
Conclusion
Kuhn’s fifth sin, then, is the sin of false dichotomy. He presents as profound the observation that some ideas are small and some are big. He dramatizes this into a grand narrative of normal science versus revolution, continuity versus rupture, tradition versus novelty. But in doing so he oversimplifies, distorts, and misleads.
The reality is more modest but more illuminating: science advances through a continuous spectrum of reconceptualisations, from the tiniest tremor to the mightiest quake. Discovery and invention intermingle; continuity and change coexist. To see this requires less drama, less rhetoric, and more careful thought. But it would save us from the intellectual confusion that Kuhn’s categories have spread.
His “really big idea” turns out to be unremarkable, even banal. And in insisting otherwise, he has done philosophy of science no service. This, more than anything else, is his fifth and most pervasive sin.
Sin V: Big Ideas, Small Ideas — Or, the Great Kuhnian Non-Revelation
1. The Dramatic Setup
Thomas Kuhn assures us, with all the gravity of a prophet descending the mountain, that science proceeds in two fundamentally different ways. On the one hand is “normal science” — a sort of dull puzzle-solving, where scientists behave like crossword enthusiasts filling in squares according to someone else’s rules. On the other hand are “scientific revolutions,” epochal events in which paradigms collapse and new, incommensurable worldviews emerge.
As he declared in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
“Normal science, for the most part, is a cumulative enterprise, producing more and more precise answers to questions already asked.” (SSR, p. 52)
And then, with his characteristic flourish:
“The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.” (SSR, p. 6)
Tradition-bound! Tradition-shattering! Puzzle-solvers versus revolutionaries! What a drama. What a page-turner. What a spectacular discovery. Except — pause here for a moment of comic deflation — what he has really told us is this:
Some ideas are big. Some ideas are small.
2. The Big-and-Small Principle
Once the purple prose is stripped away, Kuhn’s doctrine amounts to nothing more profound than this:
● Small ideas nudge our thinking a little.
● Big ideas nudge our thinking a lot.
● Sometimes a big idea can contain or subsume many small ones.
● Occasionally, a new big idea makes an old big idea redundant.
And there we have it: the magnificent doctrine of “normal science and revolutionary paradigm shifts.” Rendered in such plain language, it has all the profundity of a kindergarten sorting exercise. Big. Small. Small goes in this box, big goes in that box.
The mocking tone here is not gratuitous — it is diagnostic. Once shorn of his neologisms, Kuhn’s distinction is self-evident to the point of tautology. Six-year-olds understand that some changes are small and others are big. But for reasons best known to himself — perhaps a hangover of his Crimson days as a campus journalist — Kuhn felt compelled to inflate this triviality into a cosmic revelation.
3. But Are They Really Incommensurable?
Kuhn insists not only that some ideas are bigger than others, but that truly “big” ideas are so big they cannot be measured against their predecessors at all — they are “incommensurable.”
Thus:
“Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world.” (SSR, p. 121)
This sounds thrilling until you translate it. What he means is: when a really big idea comes along, it changes how you see the world. Again: Big ideas are bigger than small ones. Stop the presses.
The trouble, of course, is that big ideas are never wholly severed from their predecessors. Copernicus kept circles. Kepler kept Copernicus and added ellipses. Newton kept Kepler and Galileo. Einstein kept Newton for slow speeds. Darwin kept Lyell and Malthus. Pasteur kept hygiene. Big ideas grow on the branches of other big ideas. Continuity saturates discontinuity.
That makes “incommensurability” less a discovery than a slogan — an empty intensifier masquerading as insight.
4. Historical Examples Revisited (Now Under the Big/Small Lens)
● Newton vs. Einstein: Kuhn says Newton was wrong and Einstein incommensurable. But Newton still guides artillery, orbits, bridges, GPS satellites. Big idea, meet bigger idea. They coexist.
● Darwin: Revolution, yes, but also a synthesis of geology, economics, and natural history. A big idea, but stitched together from many smaller ones.
● Quantum Mechanics: Paradigm shift? Of course. But Planck, Bohr, and Heisenberg never abandoned classical physics; they extended it. A big idea, but built on the scaffolding of another big idea.
● Plate Tectonics: Kuhn would cry “revolution.” In fact, Wegener’s drift became the seafloor spreading model, but only through the slow accumulation of stratigraphy, paleontology, and magnetism. A big idea fertilised by decades of smaller ones.
None of these cases illustrates a metaphysical rupture. They illustrate scale. Some ideas are big, others small. Big contains small. Small nudges big. A continuum, not a dichotomy.
5. Scholarly Responses
Kuhn’s contemporaries recognised the triviality:
● Lakatos (1970) countered with “research programmes” that evolve — some degenerative, some progressive — but never absolutely incommensurable.
● Laudan (1977) argued progress is measured by problem-solving, large and small, not by rupture.
● Masterman (1965) skewered Kuhn by pointing out he used “paradigm” in 21 different ways, dissolving any rigid dichotomy.
● Weinberg (1998) simply observed that physics marches closer to truth by approximations, not by world-swallowing revolutions.
Each of these critiques amounts to the same deflation: Kuhn inflated scale into metaphysics.
6. Why Did Kuhn Do It?
The answer is probably biographical. He was a journalist before he was a historian. Journalists thrive on drama, binaries, crises. What better way to dramatise science than to split it in two: boring “puzzle-solving” versus thrilling “paradigm-shifting”?
The “paradigm shift” was his headline. It sold. It still sells. Yet beneath the headline lies only the banal truism that some ideas change more than others.
7. Conclusion: The Kindergarten Philosophy of Science
And so we arrive at the punchline. Kuhn’s supposed profundity about the structure of scientific revolutions can be summarised in words so simple they could appear in a children’s primer:
● Some ideas are big.
● Some ideas are small.
● Big ideas can replace old big ideas.
● Small ideas matter too, but they do less heavy lifting.
That, stripped of jargon, is it. The doctrine of normal science, paradigm shifts, and incommensurability, boiled down to its thin broth. A six-year-old could understand it. Indeed, a six-year-old probably already does.
The sin is not that Kuhn noticed this. The sin is that he persuaded generations of readers that dressing up “big ideas versus little ideas” in pompous neologisms was a philosophical breakthrough. It was not. It was a banal truism disguised as revelation — the greatest non-revelation in twentieth-century philosophy of science.
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