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Fifty years of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, twenty-five of Science in Action

Sergio Sismondo Social Studies of Science 2012 42: 415 originally published online 29 March 2012 DOI: 10.1177/0306312712439255 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sss.sagepub.com/content/42/3/415

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SSS42310.1177/0306312712439255SismondoSocial Studies of Science

Fifty years of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, twenty-five of Science in Action

Sergio Sismondo

Social Studies of Science 42(3) 415419 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0306312712439255 sss.sagepub.com

Queens University, Kingston, Canada

Keywords
actor-network theory, Bruno Latour, normal science, Thomas Kuhn

The year 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Kuhns The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Even at 50, Structure remains one of the touchstones of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Kuhn challenged dominant popular and philosophical pictures of the history of science, rejecting formalist accounts in favor of attention to the cultures and activities of scientific research, and rejecting Whiggish narratives in favor of revolutions that produced his famous or infamous incommensurable paradigms. Structure was, as Michael Lynch describes below, self-exemplifying, initiating a break with previous ways of studying science. Structure made such a dramatic impact that the book sometimes appears to be a completely isolated achievement. By contrast, Bruno Latours Science in Action (1987), which at 25 is also celebrating a major birthday this year, was firmly embedded in a developing discipline, and its influence was initially felt almost entirely within STS. That in no way takes away from the fact that the book represents a major theoretical achievement, providing a broad and integrated action-centered account of science, technology, and the social world. Although it was and remains a controversial work, Science in Action has profoundly affected the terrain on which STS scholars have worked and contributed to the field. To recognize these two anniversaries, Social Studies of Science invited a number of commentators to reflect, discuss, or celebrate. This special section of the journal assembles their responses.

Corresponding author: Sergio Sismondo, Department of Philosophy, Queens University, Kingston, ON, Canada K7L 3N6. Email: sismondo@queensu.ca

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An introduction, and some personal reflections

I read Structure as an undergraduate. A course taught by Ian Hacking introduced Kuhn through his fine essay, A Function for Thought Experiments, and then tackled the Popper/Kuhn/Lakatos/Feyerabend family of debates. Intrigued by the attacks on Kuhns work, I wanted to read Structure. I remember taking an extremely worn and much-abused copy from a University of Toronto library and carrying it around from caf to caf on a few slushy February days reading the book closely in as near to one long stretch as I could manage. Hackings charismatic and idiosyncratic teaching had already opened the door to the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (HPST), and I had walked through. But I think that it was reading Structure that made me realize that in a few short months the field had become a home for me, that I was engaging with it not merely as an undergraduate taking a course out of interest. So I stopped being a limited student of mathematics, and moved into HPST. Re-reading Structure today, Kuhn offers both more and less than at first seemed to be the case. As several of the commentators here Harry Collins, Peter Dear, Stephen Turner observe, many of Kuhns innovations were the result of (ingenious) reworkings of standard pictures of science, informed by rationalist emphases on the power of ideas, by positivist views on the nature and meaning of theories, by neo-Kantian ideas of conceptual schemes, by Wittgensteinian ideas about forms of life and perception, and more. Hideto Nakajimas account of the introduction and reception of Kuhn in Japan reminds us of various ways of reading Structure that were compatible with older frameworks. Dear characterizes Kuhns historiographic sensibility as Post-Koyrean intellectualism: ideas with a bit of social contextualization. And Collins reminds us that a book can have impact when other pieces important for its reception are in place. Nonetheless, the result was novel, and Structure did have an enormous impact, both within the academy and outside. The books broad historical and philosophical claims have been heavily drawn on and picked up as obviously right, and also dismissed as incoherent or as constituting a relativist attack on science. Its key term paradigm has found its way into everyday English used in business-speak and popular psychology in ways likely to irritate STS scholars and others. Sheila Jasanoff notes that the book has been cited more than 50,000 times. Although most of Kuhns large-scale historiographical and theoretical claims have been abandoned by STS, or were never widely taken up, we still might point to Structure as one of the key influences on the field. Kuhns elaboration of the idea of normal science still seems provocative. In the early chapters of Structure, Kuhn insists that paradigms should be thought of as exemplars. They structure the problems, the activities, and the material environments of normal science through their status as exemplars, rather than through rules that guide or dictate science. Here Kuhns observations about scientific practice gain traction because they resonate with familiar elements of everyday experience. Though Structure is ideacentered, and becomes more so as its topic moves from normal science to revolutions, it often treats scientific action as the topic to be explained. That helped to open up terrain, and it is terrain we are still exploring. We might see the point in Andrew Pickerings argument below that Kuhns different worlds thesis when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them (Kuhn, 1962: 110) deserves more attention and diverse

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development. Pickering illustrates the possibilities through his own work. The worlds he describes stabilize in conjunction with scientific practices and forms of life; one nice consequence is that he can dispense with the many hedges and qualifications surrounding the different worlds thesis in Structure. Structure was probably the first, and one of the very few, academic books that I have devoured whole. I am not sure, but it is entirely possible that Science in Action was the second, a few years later. At that point, I was a junior PhD student in Cornell Universitys HPST program. Thomas Gieryn was a visiting faculty member for a term, and I took his wonderfully systematic and organized survey course on the sociology of science. The first few chapters of Science in Action were on the syllabus, but for me the book was a page-turner, and I couldnt put it down. Shortly afterwards, Cornells HPST program merged with an undergraduate program to become a department of Science and Technology Studies, creating a fair amount of anxiety among us students who were caught mid-stream in our doctoral studies. In a different way than Structure had helped me with my earlier disciplinary transition, Science in Action helped me to negotiate the new one. Latours book presented a decidedly theoretical account of science and technology as a whole or rather, technoscience without drawing on any familiar resources from the philosophy of science. In her commentary below, Hlne Mialet describes a similar encounter with Latour and his work, which allowed her to escape the limitations of traditional French philosophy of science and to study science in reality. Part of the credit goes to actor-network theory (ANT), of course, which was a joint effort with Michel Callon, John Law, and others. For me, ANTs balancing act on a knife-edge between semiotic and materialist accounts of science allowed for an STS that could incorporate the insights of the sociology of scientific knowledge and also manage an account of science and technologys interactions with the material world. That integration suggested ways of ignoring older disciplinary divisions. I could make a home in STS as well as in HPST. Latours energetic prose enlivened studies of science and technology, introducing an incredible number of new terms and turns of phrase that were taken up as ways of organizing case studies and theoretical discussions, terms such as trials of strength, inscriptions, translation, immutable mobiles, metrology, detour, spokesperson, obligatory passage points, black box, action at a distance, and centre of calculation. Through the middle of the 1990s, it seemed that one could pick any section of Science in Action and build a project around it, matching a few key terms with a good case. This book, too, turned out to be self-exemplifying. Though I am sure that it is rarely read that way, Science in Action was written as a textbook, walking the reader through distinctly Latourian readings of some key achievements in STS. The books success stems in part from its being a popularization, most obviously of ANT, but also of a materialist constructivism, and perhaps a version of Edinburgh relativism. It was also a Machiavellian account of science. An undergraduate student of mine once said that Science in Action was a how-to manual for scientists; he has gone on to become a very successful biochemist at a major research university. In 1987, the (still) emerging framework of ANT was largely unknown, and not just to the English-speaking audiences for whom Science in Action was originally written (unlike most of Latours other works). The book presented the theory forcefully and

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straightforwardly though perhaps today it might seem to have presented a vulgar ANT, accounting for too much too simply. This popularization helped to make translation a key mode of technoscientific action, the bounds of agency into a major debate, and the simultaneous development of science and society a vibrant topic and resource. All of that is still true. In her commentary here, Vivian Lagesen reminds us that Latour also provides a general theory of action that can be productive in STS; she works through an important example, using it to see both gender and technology as heterogeneous and malleable objects. The symmetry of the construction of technoscience and society carries over into Science in Actions practical uses: Michael Lynch tells me that a student of his told him that it was a how-to manual for political organization, rather than biochemistry. We might be concerned about the poor paths that Structure and Science in Action have led us down. Stephen Turner argues that both Kuhn and Latour adopt (opposed) philosophical positions that have stood in the way of understanding scientific knowledge. Steve Fuller charges both books with short-circuiting the normative impulse in STS. As a result, he argues, both have played into the hands of developing neo-liberal ideologies of science, ideologies that Fuller thinks STS has often failed to challenge, and sometimes bought into. These are interesting and important arguments, and certainly should give us pause. The most prominent features of Structure have no place in the central frameworks of Science in Action. Latour mentions Kuhn only once in his book, giving credit to the notion of a paradigm. The word paradigm itself appears only a few times; for Latour, paradigms, like cultures are treated as residuals of analysis: these are words used to summarise the set of elements that appear to be tied to a claim that is in dispute (Latour, 1987: 201). As Turner describes in his commentary, Latour is resolutely anti-Kantian, rejecting positions that pose problems in Kuhns hands. As their titles suggest, Science in Action is the anti-Structure. There are, nonetheless, many points of contact between the two books. As I have already mentioned, though its larger topic is the history of ideas, Structure focuses on science in action as a way of understanding the dynamics of those ideas. At the other end of the spectrum, Lynch suggests that Kuhns disciplinary matrix is like at least some of Latours networks. The two approach similar objects differently, Lynch observes: The outlines of research communities may be indicated by common symbolic generalizations and citation networks, but the networks are integrated by material practices and infrastructures. In Science in Action Latour adopts the two-faced figure of Janus. One of Januss faces looks at the unfinished and tenuous science and technology of the books title. The other face looks at, in Mialets terms, the reality capable of resisting the strongest objections: the facts and artifacts that stem from building longer and stronger networks. Allowing for both of these sides to science and technology has been a challenge for STS since it abandoned positivism, roughly since Structure. Kuhn has his own version of Janus. Well into Structure, he devotes a chapter to the invisibility of scientific revolutions. (This is not, it appears, an issue in the case of STSs revolutions.) Kuhns problem is how, if the broad historical narrative he has been creating is right, can the history of science generally have been told as a story of

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straightforward progress? He returns to a topic he had discussed earlier, considering, among related genres, textbooks, a key pillar of normal science: For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts paradigm problems (Kuhn, 1962: 137). Understanding the onesidedness of objects like textbooks is part of the background to the need for a Janus. Jasanoff warns us against one-sidedness here, encouraging us to consider other, more complex, genealogies for STS. We should not forget about the many other books and articles, by other authors, that have contributed to the field, some of which should have been allowed to contribute more. At the same time, I think that any good genealogies of STS will have places for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Science in Action, and would not be one-sided in so doing. References
Kuhn TS (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour B (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Biographical note
Sergio Sismondo is a Collaborating Editor of this journal, and will be uneasily stepping into the role of Editor this year. His current research is on the political economy and epistemology of pharmaceutical knowledge. He also is the author of An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies (2nd edition; Wiley-Blackwell 2010) and other general works in Science and Technology Studies (see www.sismondo.ca).

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