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Kuhn's Structure in Japan

Hideto Nakajima Social Studies of Science 2012 42: 462 originally published online 2 April 2012 DOI: 10.1177/0306312712437619 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sss.sagepub.com/content/42/3/462

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437619
2012

SSS42310.1177/0306312712437619NakajimaSocial Studies of Science

Kuhns Structure in Japan

Hideto Nakajima

Social Studies of Science 42(3) 462466 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0306312712437619 sss.sagepub.com

Graduate School of Decision Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

Keywords
Japan, Shigeru Nakayama, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn

In this commentary, I describe the historical context of the acceptance in Japan of Thomas Kuhns (1962) Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and discuss its impact on the country. The book was translated into Japanese by Shigeru Nakayama,1 an early student of Kuhns at Harvard in the 1950s, and was published in 1971. The Japanese version is based on the second English edition printed in 1970, which includes the Postscript 1969 triggered by Nakayamas suggestion to Kuhn (Nakayama, 1971: 269270). Hajime Tanabe, a neo-Kantian philosopher, began science studies or the philosophy of science in Japan in the 1910s.2 After the rise of Japanese fascism in the 1930s, science studies and the history of science offered a retreat for Marxists. They organized the Society of Materialism Research in 1931 along with several liberal scholars, and in 1934 they published one of the two Japanese versions of Science at the Cross Roads, which contains Boris Hessens famous paper on Newtons Principia (Bukharin, 1931). In January 1946, 5 months after the end of the Asian-Pacific War, the Association of Democratic Scientists (Minka) was established. This group played an important role in the democratization of Japanese society, and at its peak had some ten thousand members. Its focus allowed for participation by scholars representing a broad range of ideologies, but members of the Society of Materialism Research became leaders. Their activities were strongly affected by the ideas of JD Bernal for example, Shoichi Sakata, a famous physicist and representative member of the association, published a Japanese translation of the Social Function of Science (Bernal, 1939) in 1951 with his colleagues and the generous assistance of Bernal. Sakata pushed the movement to focus on democratizing the university system; he criticized academic gerontocracy and advocated laboratory
Corresponding author: Hideto Nakajima, Graduate School of Decision Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Box W9-56, 2-12-1 Ookayama Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8552, Japan. Email: nakajima.h.ab@m.titech.ac.jp

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democracy, practicing the latter at the Department of Physics at Nagoya University. Sakata and Mitsuo Taketani, both of whom collaborated with Hideki Yukawa, the first Nobel Prize Laureate from Japan, developed science studies on the basis of a picture of the dialectics of nature. Their work offered a theoretical basis for major social movements of the time, and attracted numerous supporters. Tetsu Hiroshige, an active member of the association and a well-known historian of science, wrote that the activities of the organization culminated around 195051 (Hiroshige, 1960: 153). However, the association was suspended in 1956 due to the Cold War and political turmoil within the Marxist community. The Marxist-led scientists movement became weaker in the 1960s, though its influence remained. For example, Sakata proposed the Kyoto Scientists Conference with Yukawa and Shinichiro Tomonaga as a response to the Pugwash Conference for nuclear disarmament. The decline of Marxist science studies coincided with the increasing influence of logical positivism in Japan. The Japan Association for Philosophy of Science was organized in 1954 and the Japanese edition of Hans Reichenbachs (1951) The Rise of Scientific Philosophy appeared in the same year. The Philosophy of Science Meeting was started in 1957. WVO Quines (1961) Methods of Logic was translated into Japanese in 1963 and the Philosophical Foundation of Physics by Rudolf Carnap (1966) was translated in 1968. In 1964, major proponents of positivism edited a book titled Philosophy of a Scientific Age (Baifukan Pub., in Japanese). When I was a student, it was recommended that I read this book because it was considered a standard guidebook for logical positivism. The books introduction identified the date of the beginning of the diffusion of logical positivism in Japan as 1953, and mentions Shozo Omori as an active advocate of its philosophy; his paper, written in 1953, was reprinted in the book (Aomi, 1964: 6798; Omori, 1953). Omori was an important faculty member at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Tokyo (hereafter HPS-Tokyo), during the Departments early stages. The Department was established in 1951 by Bunichi Tamamushi, a physical chemist, after his visit to Harvard in 1950 (HPS-Tokyo, 2011). Tamamushi was impressed by the history and philosophy of science in Harvards General Education Program and decided to launch HPS at the University of Tokyo. Omori graduated from the Department of Physics at Tokyo Imperial University in 1944. Before he was hired by HPS-Tokyo in 1952, he was sent to Oberlin College in Ohio from 1950 to 1951 through the US Government and Relief in Occupied Areas Program (GARIOA) (Murakami, 1989: 162165).3 During the first stage, HPS-Tokyo offered only undergraduate education programmes. It initiated a graduate programme in 1970. The following year the Japanese translation of Kuhns Structure was published. Keiichi Noe, former President of the Philosophical Association of Japan, entered the HPS-Tokyo graduate school in 1972, intending to study logical positivism under Omori. He wrote that when he attended a class on Kuhns Structure run by Yoichiro Murakami, a part-time lecturer at HPS-Tokyo, he could not understand the importance of the concept of a paradigm. Though Noe already was familiar with Kuhns Structure, he was reading about it through the idea of the Vienna Circles old paradigm of philosophy of science (Noe, 1998: 1213). When I joined HPS-Tokyo as a third-year student in 1978, Omori was still very active. I remember his classes on Wittgenstein well. Other faculty members at that time included

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Shuntaro Ito (a student of Marshall Clagett at the University of Wisconsin), Masao Watanabe (who promoted Herbert Butterfields concept of the Scientific Revolution, and a good friend of Rupert Halls) and Murakami, then a newly appointed associate professor and later my mentor in the 1980s. Murakami is the author of New Science Studies (1979). This was (and still is) a popular introduction to the new philosophy of science: it has been widely read and the latest printing (1st edn, 46th printing) was issued in 2010.4 HPS-Tokyo, thus, was a gateway to Anglo-American history and philosophy of science, and was removed from the preceding Marxist traditions. Around 1980, when I proceeded to the graduate school at HPS-Tokyo, Kuhns influence was progressing to the next stage. First, Chikara Sasaki, Kuhns student at Princeton, returned to Japan in 1980 as a lecturer. In his classes, Sasaki emphasized the importance of professionalism for historians of science, an attitude he was said to have adopted from Kuhn and Charles C. Gillispie. Sasaki offered reading lists of their lectures at Princeton to students in his classes in Japan, and he also emphasized Kuhns importance for research on the social history of science. To me, the image of Kuhn that Sasaki delivered was perplexing, because, before then, I had understood Kuhn solely in the context of the philosophy of science. The second stage occurred with the introduction of SSK in Japan. My senior colleagues in the graduate school of HPS-Tokyo initiated a research group that focused on reading the works of David Bloor and Barry Barnes. As a marginal member of the group, I unintentionally participated in the introduction of SSK into Japan. From 1987 to 1991, this group published four volumes of the Re-Thinking Science Series (Bokutaku Pub., in Japanese). A characteristic of the Series was a relativistic view of science. Indeed, the introduction of the first volume was entitled Discourse on new pseudoscience (Shimosaka, 1987: 724), which was immediately followed by my chapter Newtons alchemy (in Shimosaka, 1987: 2567). An institutional approach to the history of science, interests in scientific controversy and the sociology of science were vivid in subsequent volumes. The Series aimed at demystifying science, and tried to take into account the socio-cognitive contexts of scientific research. It was possible due to the theoretical developments from Kuhn to SSK. In 1984, Nakayama, who had prepared the Japanese version of Structure, edited Re-thinking Paradigm Theory to retrospectively consider Structures impact during the previous two decades. He pointed out that the political radicalism and professional introspection that peaked in the late 1960s formed a background for the enthusiastic reception of the concept of paradigm (Nakayama, 1984: 6). Though he mentioned its influence on the historiography of science, he wrote that it had far more influence on the social sciences, including sociology, politics and economics (Nakayama, 1984: 16). This observation is confirmed by the chapters contributed by Takamitsu Sawa, a popular economist, and Atsuhiro Shibatani, an activist biologist. For example, Shibatani wrote I took out the idea of paradigm from science or history of science, and tried to test its validity in social practices and struggles (in Nakayama, 1984: 166). Though Nakayama does not refer in the book to Kuhns impact on feminist studies of science, it gradually became visible later. For example, Mariko Ogawa, a collaborator of Londa Schiebingers in Japan, emphasized Kuhns importance for feminism in her 2001 book titled Feminism and Science/Technology. She wrote that Kuhns Structure brought

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about revolutionary change to our view of science and argued that it had an important impact for initiating feminist science studies in the world (Ogawa, 2001: 16ff.). Kunio Goto, who co-edited A Social History of Science and Technology in Contemporary Japan with Nakayama, wrote that student activism or the university conflict succeeded to rid academic science of pageantry, but [it] failed to replace this with substance (Nakayama et al., 20012006: vols 3, 7). It seems to me that a similar point applies to Kuhns impact in Japan. It is true that the idea of a paradigm served to deconstruct the image of science as an unquestionable truth. It prepared a theoretical basis for the sociology of science and socio-historical approach to science. It is now widely understood that the boundary between science and non-science is worked out socially. However, the developments after Structure did not offer a theoretical framework suggesting how any systems of science should operate. After the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, the first president of the Japanese Society for Science and Technology Studies (JSSTS) and one of the core members of the group that produced the Re-Thinking Science Series, asked me What did we do for the last two decades? Indeed, the Japanese STS community has been rather quiet, particularly in confronting ongoing social disasters. Unfortunately, we are not broadly equipped with the necessary theoretical tools to analyse problems in real science that are entangled not only with economic and institutional interests, but also with social and international power politics. Science studies from Kuhn to SSK have focused on the descriptive analysis of science, while normative arguments about science, which were conspicuous in both Marxist and logical positivist science studies, were forgotten. It seems that this weak point, or limit, originates from Kuhns (1962: x) conception of paradigms as universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners. That conception does not provide any normative message about how science should exist or co-exist. Can we find solutions in Bruno Latours (1987) Science in Action, the impact of which is limited in Japan even today? I am rather suspicious of this, because Latours approach seems no less descriptive than Kuhns. Most likely, it should be our responsibility to develop Japanese STS to the next stage on the shoulder of preceding giants. This is a challenge Fukushima imposes upon us. Notes
1. In this essay I adopt the Western convention of placing surnames second even for Japanese names. 2. For pre-war history, see Nakajima (2007). The description in the following three paragraphs also draws upon the four-volume A Social History of Science and Technology in Contemporary Japan (Nakayama et al., 20012006) particularly Vol. 1, Chapters 25 and 28, and Vol. 2, Chapters 17 and 18. 3. The chapter including the pages was written by Keiichi Noe. The GARIOA Program was succeeded by the Fulbright Program in 1952. 4. This book mentions Kuhn; however, its description focuses on NR Hanson. Almost no changes were made to its text from the 1st printing to the 46th.

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Aomi J, Ishimoto A, Omori S, Sawada N, Yoshida N (eds) (1964), Philosophy of a Scientific Age. Tokyo: Baifukan Pub. (in Japanese). Bernal JD (1939) The Social Function of Science. London: Faber and Faber. Bukharin NI (1931) Science at the Cross Roads: Papers Presented to the International Congress of the History of Science and Technology, held in London from June 29th to July 3rd, 1931, by the Delegates of the USSR (essays by NI Bukharin and others). London: Kniga, Ltd. Carnap R (1966) Philosophical Foundations of Physics; An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. New York: Basic Books. Hiroshige T (1960) Science Movements in Postwar Japan. Tokyo: Chuo Koron-sha Pub. [in Japanese]. HPS-Tokyo (2011) Official web page of HPS-Tokyo, Japanese part. Available at: http://hps.c.utokyo.ac.jp/about/history/index.php (accessed 30 December 2011). 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. Murakami Y (1979) New Science Studies. Tokyo: Kodansha Ltd. [in Japanese]. Murakami Y (ed.) (1989) Important Books in Contemporary Science Studies. Tokyo: Chuo Koron-sha Pub. [in Japanese]. Nakajima H (2007) Difference in East Asian STS: European origin or American origin? East Asian Science, Technology and Society 1: 237241. Nakayama S (1971) Afterword. In: TS Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Japanese edn). Tokyo: Misuzu-shobo Pub., 269277. Nakayama S (1984) Rethinking Paradigm Theory. Kyoto: Minerva Shobo Pub. [in Japanese]. Nakayama S, Goto K and Yoshioka H (eds) (20012006) A Social History of Science and Technology in Contemporary Japan, four volumes. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Noe K (1998) Kuhn. Tokyo: Kodansha Ltd. [in Japanese]. Ogawa M (2001) Feminism and Science/Technology. Tokyo: Iwanami Pub. [in Japanese]. Omori S (1953) Logical positivism. Tetsugaku Zasshi [Journal of the Philosophical Association of Japan] 68: 4380 [in Japanese]. Quine WVO (1961) Methods of Logic. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Reichenbach H (1951) The Rise of Scientific Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shimosaka E, Sugiyama S, Takada K (eds) (1987) Between Science and Pseudoscience, Vol. 1 of the Re-Thinking Science Series. Tokyo: Bokutaku Pub. [in Japanese].

Biographical note
Hideto Nakajima is Professor of History of Science and Technology at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the President of the Japanese Society for Science and Technology Studies.

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