Chapter 9 - I Wanna Be A Professor!

Chapter 9 - I Wanna Be A Professor!

 

 

At the time of his “epiphany” of empathy, Kuhn was but a Master’s graduate. His desire to advance his career by the most efficient path available, regardless of actual academic interest, meant that he had to proceed to achieve a PhD if he was to become an academic, of any sort. Evidently, the actual physics work, in the actual world, that he had pursued in Europe no longer held his interest, and might have been inadequately glorious for him. Evidently, he could not advance himself as a brilliant physicist in the mold of a Richard Feynman. So he had to get, by hook or crook, a PhD.

 

Kuhn went on to choose a sympathetic and helpful PhD mentor, and a thesis subject that would deliver the object of his desire. To wit: “The Cohesive Energy of Monovalent Metals as a Function of the Atomic Quantum Defects”, by Thomas Kuhn, delivered the requisite PhD. It was an obscure paper that was superseded in its content in only a couple of years, and Thomas Kuhn PhD Physicist never published *in physics* again, as far as I have been able to ascertain. Thus, as a publishing PhD physicist, one’s legacy or academic standing *in physics* cannot be any less meritorious, cannot be any more mediocre, than that of Thomas Kuhn.

 

“While studying for his PhD Kuhn became rather isolated from other people, repeating the experience of his final high school years. Working in an almost all-male setting, he worried his mother by not dating women. He agreed to undergo psychoanalysis. Looking back on the experience, he said he hated the psychiatrist, who would fall asleep during sessions. The psychoanalysis ended because the psychiatrist left town and Kuhn got married.”   

 

So on the basis of his “epiphany”, on the basis of wanting an academic career rather than as a working physicist, on the basis of preferring the task of arguing the non-falsifiable to undergraduates rather than risk the falsifiability (and resultant ignominy) of actual physics hypothesis-generation, experimentation and research, from 1947 (at age 25) Kuhn opted to continue teaching a course in  the history of science at Harvard, and he was to do so for nine years, until 1956.

 

And Kuhn remained a careerist, and the next object of his careerist aspiration was to achieve a Professorship as a Professor *of Philosophy*. This he sought, despite not being formally graduated *in Philosophy*, and he was never offered a Professorship *in Philosophy* at Harvard.

 

Undeterred, in 1957 Kuhn shifted over to University of California Berkeley where he was appointed an “assistant Professor” in both the History and Philosophy departments, and from 1958 as a tenured “associate Professor” in both Departments. Kuhn persisted, and in 1961 was dubbed a Professor of the History of Science at UC Berkeley, but that was still not the status Kuhn sought. I quote from <iep.ut.edu> “Kuhn was made a full Professor at Berkeley, but only in the History department. Members of the Philosophy Department voted to deny him promotion in their department, a denial that angered and hurt Kuhn tremendously” (it seems he wasn’t very philosophic about it).

 

Sometimes the best way up is out. From 1964 he was at Princeton teaching at their new history and philosophy of science program, becoming program director in 1967 and made a full Professor *of history* in 1968. From there, Kuhn moved to MIT in 1979, eventually there becoming (at long last) a Professor *of Philosophy* in 1983, having turned 60.

 

Thus it took Kuhn 27 years to achieve the promotion he had sought, from being a Professor of the History of Science to becoming a Professor of Philosophy.

 

As we examine his writings, it is apparent that for his entire academic career Kuhn was ever quick to leverage his status *as a physicist* (granted, later “former physicist”) to assert a preeminence over his non-science-PhD undergraduate students and his non-science-PhD academic peers in history and philosophy departments. This he did, repeatedly and unerringly, whenever he needed in his philosophic arguments to drill home some point and plain logic and rhetoric was not convincing his interlocutor. This he did, despite his academic career *as a physicist* being singularly mediocre.

 

And it was *as a physicist* that Kuhn was to write his famous “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, and it was because he wrote that work *as a physicist* that it carried such momentum.

 

Yet we will see that because within that work he commits errors *as a physicist* that the great majority of competent physicists would never make, errors that the great majority of his non-scientific readers (being undergraduates and otherwise humanities academics) never detect or wish to detect, his legacy has been to precipitate an unhappy proportion of the science wars and history wars that continue to bedevil academia.

 

His legacy was to precipitate such an estrangement between the essential positivism upon which scientific progress rests and the epistemological relativism his work spawned, that he was to ultimately declare:

 

“I am not a Kuhnian”

 

But by then it was too late.