Alasdair MacIntyre and Thomas Kuhn: Rationality and Progress in Science

Alasdair MacIntyre and Thomas Kuhn: Rationality and Progress in Science

Kyle McCaffery

PLS 30411: Scientific Inquiry: Theories and Practices

Prof. Tom Stapleford

12 December 2014

The progressive nature of science presents a particular set of problems for Thomas

Kuhn’s paradigmatic theory of scientific revolutions. Competing paradigms, according to Kuhn,

are incommensurable to such an extent that the shift from one paradigm to another occurs

through “a conversion experience that cannot be forced.”1 On the surface this act of faith appears

to be contradictory to the empirical claims of science, as well as the understanding that science is

progressive in its very nature. For if a shift in paradigm occurs only through faith in the chosen

paradigm, then the progress of science from its beginnings to now has been built on a series of

“conversion experiences” rather than a rational choice of one paradigm over another.

Furthermore, his theory leads Kuhn to suggest that science does not proceed towards truth as a

goal, but, as Darwin’s evolution does, proceeds to specialization and articulation without any

specific goal. For Kuhn, scientific revolutions become a fight for the survival of the fittest. Kuhn

is in fact proposing a “decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now

possessed.”2 Out of this transformation emerges the problem of progress, a problem which Kuhn

attempts to solve by altering the definition of progress as well as our understanding of science’s

fundamental goal.

Kuhn’s primary indictment by the academic community is that he reduces science to a

series of irrational revolutions that always result in an extended period of rational puzzle-solving.

Kuhn denies these claims to irrationality, responding that our concepts of rationality need to be

revised in order to accommodate his definition of science.3 This new rationality begins to emerge

2

1 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 150.

2 Ibid, 1.

3 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science,” in Paradigms and Revolutions: Appraisals and Applications of Thomas Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science, ed. Gary Gutting, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980) 69.

from Kuhn’s revision of scientific progress, during both normal and revolutionary periods of

science.

In the last chapter of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn presents various

definitions of the scientific practice, suggesting that progress is an inherent quality to science and

yet is also the only name for the practice of science which must occur within insulated,

paradigm-controlled communities. Progress during normal scientific activity, according to Kuhn,

is the natural result of successful, creative work by an insulated scientific community. He writes

that, “In its normal state, then, a scientific community is an immensely efficient instrument for

solving the problems or puzzles that its paradigm defines. Furthermore, the result of solving

those problems must inevitably be progress.”4 Science, as Kuhn understands it, is an instrument

whose product can only be defined as progress because its puzzle-solving nature is incapable of

producing successful findings that can be defined in any other way. Kuhn takes his claim one

step further, saying that “the scientific community could view the fruits of its work in no other

way”5 than as progress. The result of science is progress, but progress is also the defining

characteristic of science because “the term ‘science’ is reserved for fields that do progress in

obvious ways.”6 In all three of the above quotations, progress is connected with a “scientific

community,” not just a scientific discipline. Kuhn’s definition of progress unavoidably poses the

question of what exactly he means by a scientific community, and his definition of a scientific

community leads directly into his adjusted notion of rationality, a notion which Kuhn believes

3

4 Kuhn, Structures, 165.

5 Ibid, 162.

6 Ibid, 159.

revises the contemporary understanding of science in line with the historical record of scientific

practice.

In order to understand progress in science, Kuhn demonstrates how a scientific

community is constructed in such a way that progress becomes an inherent characteristic.

Scientific communities are formed so as to be insulated from society in such a way that, as Kuhn

states, they can “view the fruits of [their] work in no other way [than as progress].”7 First of all,

these scientific communities exist chiefly during periods of normal science when the paradigm is

unquestioned; the first layer of insulation, then, is the norms and standards of the paradigm

which direct each scientist’s efforts. As such, there is an “absence at most times of competing

schools that question each other’s aims and standards” which “makes the progress of a normal-

scientific community far easier to see.”8 Progress, however, is not simply easier to see but is

actually easier to intend. Kuhn refers to this as an insulation from the demands of society: “the

insulation of the scientific community from society permits the individual scientist to concentrate

his attempts upon problems that he has good reason to believe he will be able to solve.”9 The

scientist, as a puzzle-solver within normal science, can to a large extent determine the success of

his results by choosing “problems that he has good reason to believe he will be able to solve.”

The scientist within a paradigm has the ability to choose which problems to investigate based on

the probability of success rather than the necessity of success.

Another layer of insulation in which the scientific community exists arises from the

formation of scientists through textbook education, a formation which has consequences for the

4

7 Ibid, 162.

8 Ibid, 163.

9 Ibid, 163.

structure of scientific revolutions. Kuhn first contrasts the normal scientific community with the

liberal arts communities:

the student in any one of these disciplines [the liberal arts and social sciences] is constantly made aware of the immense variety of problems that the members of his future group have, in the course of time, attempted to solve. Even more important, he has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately evaluate for himself.10

Whereas students and even professors in the non-scientific disciplines are always conscious of

the history of crisis within the tradition of their study, students of the sciences, through their

unique textbook tradition, are formed in such a way that they are for the most part unaware of

epistemological crises. Science textbooks distill the tumultuous history of science into a “far

briefer, more precise, and more systematic form.”11 Through this kind of distillation process,

potential scientists are habituated into the paradigm, allowing them to see the world as shaped by

the reigning paradigm. As Kuhn observes, “for normal-scientific work, for puzzle-solving within

the tradition that the textbooks define, the scientist is almost perfectly equipped.”12 The

unfortunate result of this educational tradition, however, is that “scientific training is not well

designed to produce the man who will easily discover a fresh approach”13 to science. In fact, this

educational tradition is the kind of progressive and accumulative view of science which Kuhn is

attempting to transform.14 For this tradition

5

10 Ibid, 164.

11 Ibid, 165.

12 Ibid, 165.

13 Ibid, 165.

14 Ibid, 1.

makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist’s perception of his discipline’s past... he comes to see it as leading in a straight line to the discipline’s present vantage. In short, he comes to see it as progress. No alternative is available to him while he remains in the field.15

As the scientific community insulates itself through its education and paradigmatic structure, it

cannot but see its findings as progress both within the paradigm and within the history of

science. The insulation which makes possible the education of scientists and the formation of

their communities “equip[s] [them] for another task as well–the generation through normal

science of significant crises.”16 The insulation that characterizes scientific communities is in fact

the cause of the repeated crises which also characterizes those communities.

Kuhn believes that the nature of normal science inevitably produces both progress and

crises; in a strange kind of similarity, the larger pattern of scientific revolutions, which is the

main thesis of Kuhn’s work, derives its own kind of progress from the kind of progress which

characterizes normal science. Because the result of scientific revolutions is a return to normal

science, they are also a return to the isolation inherent to normal scientific communities.

“Revolutions close with a total victory for one of the two opposing camps,”17 and with a total

victory comes the benefit of writing the history of the revolution as the victor wishes it to be

written. The appearance of progress in the history of science is in fact a result of this total

victory, as Kuhn almost cynically notes: “To them [the victors], at least, the outcome of

revolution must be progress, and they are in an excellent position to make certain that future

6

15 Ibid, 166.

16 Ibid, 165.

17 Ibid, 165.

members of their community will see past history in the same way.”18 Science’s claims to

progress, as Kuhn sees them, are illusions created in order to educate future scientists into the

victorious paradigm. Kuhn identifies the textbook education tradition with this kind of revisionist

history that follows a paradigm shift, a history which always presents the development of science

as a progressive accumulation of theories. He also goes to great lengths to state that this is not

simply a cafeteria-style history where theories are chosen from a vast array for their relevance to

the paradigm, but also that this revision of history is the only possible option for the victorious

paradigm. In Kuhn’s understanding, anything less than a total revision of history according to the

prevalent paradigm is to say that the “victory had been something less than progress.”19 He adds,

moreover, that failure to write such a history “would be rather like admitting that [the victors]

had been wrong and their opponents right.”20 This view of progress, however, is not the entirety

of Kuhn’s view because there is another kind of progress which is exempt from this formulation,

the progress of specialization in science.

The treasure of the historical record of science for Kuhn, is the demonstration that as

science has progressed throughout time it has resulted in specializations which lead to further

specializations. Specialization, then, is the only evidence for real progress in the fields of

science, and it is an evolutionary kind of progress. Kuhn draws on Darwin’s theory of evolution

to explain the progress of science through scientific revolutions, for progress as Darwin

described it was not towards any goal but rather towards a specialization which ensured survival.

Kuhn’s evolutionary theory doubles as his account of the survival and adaption of science:

7

18 Ibid, 166.

19 Ibid, 165.

20 Ibid, 165-6.

The developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings–a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything...the resolution of revolutions is the selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science. The net results of a sequence of such revolutionary selections, separated by periods of normal research, is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge. Successive stages in that developmental process are marked by an increase in articulation and specialization.21

There is for Kuhn no goal to science except the realization of its nature to be a “wonderfully

adapted set of instruments.” An evolutionary view of science is the adjustment in rationality

which he believes exempts him from the charges of irrationality raised at the beginning of this

paper.

The “increase in articulation and specialization” are the fruits of progress in Kuhn’s

theory of scientific revolutions, and this evolutionary stance alters the foundational relationship

between science and the truth. Already controversial in itself, this evolutionary theory leads

Kuhn to his most controversial statement of all, that the truth is superfluous to the project of

science. He says that, in light of this evolutionary vision, “We may, to be more precise, have to

relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those

who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.”22 Kuhn appears to be afraid of the ultimate

conclusion of science as progressive accumulation because it results in the eradication of science

by its own practice, for the complete accumulation of all scientific knowledge would preclude

any further need for science itself. He is also concerned that science should not become ignorant

of its own history. He therefore makes a dramatic shift in the opposite direction. In protecting

8

21 Ibid, 169-70.

22 Ibid, 169.

science from this self-destructive view, Kuhn attempts to say that science is still a rational

process in spite of the inability of reason to mediate scientific revolutions and even more

radically in spite of Kuhn’s science being divorced from the truth. The result of Kuhn’s

evolutionary claims are that science proceeds to no end besides specialization, and he asks his

audience to accept that end as the nature of science: “Does it really help to imagine that there is

some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific

achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?”23 In order to agree

with Kuhn, any student of science must be content that his ultimate end is to solve puzzles,

though the puzzles themselves have no relationship to the truth.

Alasdair MacIntyre rejects Kuhn’s understanding of both scientific rationality and

scientific progress, instead advancing his own view in which progress is intelligible through the

lens of a historical tradition. This tradition, rather than rejecting the past, comes to better

understand both the merits and failings of the past. According to MacIntyre’s revision of Kuhn,

scientific revolutions allow one to understand not just what threw science into a crisis but also

why the previous paradigm is completed by the answers found in the present paradigm. He

conceives progress as the continual revision of a historical narrative that makes it possible to

understand the history of scientific progress. The leaders of scientific revolution, for MacIntyre,

do not inhabit an incommensurable paradigm to which they demand the community convert, but

rather inhabit both competing paradigms (like Aquinas or Einstein), resolving the crisis by

reconciling the two paradigms with each other. For Einstein, he did not overthrow Newtonian

physics, but instead was able to understand Newtonian physics in terms of special relativity,

9

23 Ibid, 170.

resolving the epistemological crisis by explaining the inadequacy of Newtonian physics while

also articulating how special relativity was, in a way, demanded by Newtonian physics. This

explanation, MacIntyre’s criticism and revision of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific

revolutions, resolves the problem of scientific progress in a more satisfactory way than Kuhn’s

appeal to Darwinian evolution because MacIntyre understands crisis in a more complete way

than Kuhn did, allowing him to present the resolution of crises in a rational manner that retains a

fundamental relationship to the truth.

MacIntyre’s response to Kuhn’s unsatisfactory conclusion consists in a criticism of

Kuhn’s conceptions of epistemological crises and the progress of science, as well as a revision of

those flaws inherent within Kuhn’s position. Beginning with his own understanding of what an

epistemological crisis is, MacIntyre describes how Kuhn’s explanation of crisis is inherently

flawed. According to MacIntyre, Kuhn’s first mistake is that he overestimates the

incommensurability of paradigms. He states that “The normal-scientific tradition that emerges

from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but often actually incommensurable with

that which has gone before,”24 and that incommensurability is so extreme that “after a revolution

scientists are responding to a different world.”25 MacIntyre, however, protests that this is an

overestimation of the crisis because what is not thrown into doubt is the ability to construct a

narrative out of the historical tradition in which the scientific community or individual scientist

resides. This narrative preserves certain key aspects of a history such as identity and purpose

10

24 Ibid, 103.

25 Ibid, 111.

which prevent the crisis from forcing the affected community or individual into an unintelligible

skepticism like David Hume.26

Falling into the same trap as Descartes did, Kuhn “concealed from himself... an

unacknowledged background of beliefs which rendered what he was doing intelligible and sane

to himself and to others.”27 That background within the field of science includes the pre-existing

historical narrative shared by the entire community, regardless of paradigm, a narrative which

retains the identity and purpose of the community. By disregarding this “background of beliefs,”

Kuhn presents “an account of epistemological crises in natural science which is essentially the

same as the Cartesian account of epistemological crises in philosophy.”28 In Structures, Kuhn

unwittingly articulates a counter example to his conception of history. Because he locates

scientific rationality within paradigms, thereby ignoring the “background of beliefs,” Kuhn

seems to conceive of history as a kind of fossil record of unintelligible paradigms. Ignorant of

this background, he fails to recognize that his example of the “incommensurability” of Einstein’s

physics and Newton’s physics implies that there exists a history in their development which is

intelligible. Kuhn says that “the physical referents of these Einsteinian concepts are by no means

identical with those of the Newtonian concepts that bear the same name.”29 And because they are

not identical, any attempt to compare them to one another leads one, as MacIntyre describes

phlogiston theory, to conclude that “at each stage the theory bears the marks of its previous

history, of a series of encounters with confirming or anomalous evidence, with other theories,

11

26 MacIntyre, “Crises, Narrative and Science,” 64-5.

27 Ibid, 63.

28 Ibid, 67.


with metaphysical points of view, and so on.”30 By demonstrating the difference between

Einsteinian concepts and Newtonian concepts, Kuhn demonstrates that they require a history to

understand how one became incommensurable with the other. They are, therefore, not entirely

incommensurable.

The writing of a new dramatic narrative that explains the transformation of one paradigm

into another in a truly intelligible construction, such as the transformation from Newtonian

absolute space to Einsteinian relative space-time, is the only rational resolution to an

epistemological crisis: this is MacIntyre’s revision of Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions and

progress. Demonstrating where Kuhn’s theory was incoherent, MacIntyre then uses that

demonstration to support his own ideas and amend Kuhn’s into a single narrative, as MacIntyre

writes: “Kuhn’s work criticised provides an illuminating application for the ideas which I

[MacIntyre] have been defending.”31 Contradicting Kuhn’s belief that paradigm shifts happen

through “conversion experiences,” MacIntyre’s historical-narrative theory articulates a rational

way in which paradigms can be compared and chosen: alternate historical narratives are

constructed taking into account the way in which particular paradigms understand the same

events; the narratives are compared to one another; this comparison allows one to see whether a

certain narrative gives an intelligible account of the series of events which resolves the current

crisis. Furthermore, Kuhn himself understands history in this same way, yet fails to recognize it

in the scientific tradition. Kuhn writes that “No natural history can be interpreted in the absence

of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits

12

30 MacIntyre, “Crises, Narrative and Science,” 71.


selection, evaluation, and criticism.”32 While he recognizes the application of natural history

within a paradigm, Kuhn fails to realize that it is impossible remain intelligible to others without

that “implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief.” MacIntyre has restored

a true rationality to Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, with the condition that “Scientific

reason turns out to be subordinate to, and intelligible only in terms of, historical reason.”33 What

still remains in doubt is how exactly this narrative can be written, and how this process as a

whole compares to Kuhn’s evolutionary view of science.

Drawing on his previous work with narrative traditions in his book Three Rival Versions

of Moral Enquiry, MacIntyre describes theological and philosophical revolution embodied in the

work of Thomas Aquinas in the same way he describes the narrative of scientific revolutions.

The medieval university roughly during the period of Thomas Aquinas’s life was undergoing an

epistemological crisis in the philosophical and theological disciplines. Spain set the stage for an

encounter between the Islamic and Christian philosophical traditions, both of whom were

responding to the monumental figures of Greek though, Aristotle and Plato. Preserved and

critically engaged by Muslims like Averroes and Aviccena, Aristotle’s works were for the most

part absent from the Christian tradition, which was instead formed by Augustine’s Neoplatonism.

In medieval Christian universities, Aristotle was just beginning to be incorporated into the

curriculum, and this led to a crisis which MacIntyre describes in this way:

the underlying Augustinian dilemma: to refuse to integrate the Aristotelian corpus and its teaching into the curriculum would have been to seem to abandon the claim that theology can indeed order and direct the other secular sciences and arts;

13



yet it seemed that to accept the Aristotelian corpus into the curriculum would be to produce incoherence in the structure of teaching and knowledge.34

The incorporation of Aristotle seemed to be necessitated by the Augustinian unity of knowledge,

yet it was impossible to reconcile the immortality of the soul and the creation of the world into

Aristotle’s thought. The two traditions of thought, or philosophical paradigms, were not

incommensurable, but they were irreconcilably incoherent.

Thomas Aquinas, educated during this period of crisis, ended the epistemological crisis of

the time by rewriting the narrative tradition so that Aristotelianism and Augustiniansim, when

united, formed an intelligible philosophical narrative. His Summa Theologiae is the work that

demonstrates the result of Aquinas reconciliation of the two competing paradigms. There is no

“conversion experience” required to choose between the two, and the resolution of the crisis

refutes Kuhn’s theory that paradigms replace each other; what instead happens with Thomas

Aquinas, and what MacIntyre wants to say happens in every revolution, is that the two

paradigms are woven into each other in such a way that they form a single, rational narrative:

In this third type of debate [about rational justification], characterized by some large degree of incommensurability, the type of claim which has to be made and then established or refuted is precisely that which Aquinas advanced... It is, as we noticed earlier, the claim to provide a standpoint which suffers from less incoherence, is more comprehensive and more resourceful, but especially resourceful in one particular way. For among those resources, so it is claimed, is an ability not only to identify as limitations, defects, and errors of the opposing view what are or ought to be taken to be limitations, defects, and errors in the light of the standards of the opposing view itself, but also to explain in precise and detailed terms what it is about the opposing view which engenders just these particular limitations, defects, and errors and also what it is about that view which must deprive it of the resources required for understanding, overcoming, and correcting them. And at the same time it will be claimed that what is cogent,

14

34 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 109.

insightful, and true in that opposing view can be incorporated within one’s own view, providing on occasion needed corrections of that view.35

Aquinas’s narrative is one that can be evaluated against the other responses to Aristotelianism

and chosen as the most rational and true narrative available because it does not reject what was

“cogent, insightful, and true in that opposing narrative,” and “explain[s] in precise and detailed

terms what it is about the opposing view which engenders just these particular limitations,

defects, and errors and also what it is about that view which must deprive it of the resources

required for understanding, overcoming, and correcting them.”36 This explanation in the form of

a narrative is the same advanced by MacIntyre as a necessary revision of Kuhn’s theory.

In Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, where MacIntyre goes into great length to

describe the whole process by which Aquinas was able to and did resolve the most pressing

epistemological crisis of his time, is not about science. The philosophical or theological

disciplines appear to be very different from the empirical and progressive nature of science.

MacIntyre, however maintains that even science is subject to the necessity of an intelligible

narrative because it is a rational system of thought in relationship to the world, just like

philosophy and theology. If what MacIntyre claims is a legitimate connection between the

disciplines, then there should be evidence of a narrative formation within scientific texts just as

there was in the Summa.

Einstein’s theory of relativity provides such an example of a reconciliation through

narrative. Einstein, like Aquinas, was living in a period of crisis, when discoveries about the

speed of light completely contradicted the foundations of Newtonian mechanics. Einstein

15

35 Ibid, 145-6.

36 Ibid, 145-6.

constructs a narrative for his theory of relativity, publishing it as Relativity: The Special and

General Theory in order “to present the main ideas [of relativity] in the simplest and most

intelligible form, and on the whole, in the sequence and connection in which they actually

originated.”37 The previous quotation is from the Preface written by Einstein himself, and it

reveals that he is conscious of the necessity to present the narrative not just in an “intelligible

form,” but also “in the sequence and connection in which they actually originated.” Einstein is

not offering one explanation out of many, but claiming that the account he presents is true. It is,

however, not the simplest. A quote from Tim Maudlin reveals that Einstein’s presentation is

perhaps not the easiest way to understand relativity:

Special Relativity is a very simple theory that is commonly presented in a complex and confusing way... we ought to begin with the intrinsic geometry, not with coordinate systems or reference frames... We were very pleased that in Galilean space-time, nothing has an absolute speed. So it ought to strike us as going backward to found Special Relativity on claims about the speed of anything. Basing a presentation of Relativity on talk of speeds unavoidably suggests that we are dealing again with Newtonian absolute space and time and Newtonian absolute motion.38

So while Einstein’s presentation is not actually the simplest explanation, it appears that Einstein

is more concerned that there is an intelligible history between Newton and himself. Whether it

actually is true is not so important to the present discussion, but what is of supreme importance is

that Einstein does not see any incommensurability between himself and Newton, nor does he

think that his theory can be described as a paradigm that will later be overthrown; rather,

Einstein, given his knowledge of both classical physics and relativity, is attempting to present a

16

37 Albert Einstein, preface to Relativity: The Special and General Theory, trans. Robert W. Lawson. (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2001).

38 Tim Maudlin, Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012) 67

true historical narrative that resolves the epistemological crisis present not just in the practice of

normal science but infecting both scientists’ and non-scientists’ fundamental understanding of

what is really there.

In the structure of the argument in Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Einstein

is presenting a MacIntyrian resolution to crisis. He describes Newtonian-Galilean mechanics for

seven chapters before articulating his theory of Special Relativity. Those seven chapters form a

history of the theory of relativity in the restricted sense, as well as the development of physics in

relation to the world. Like Aquinas, Einstein is “explain[ing] in precise and detailed terms what it

is about the opposing view which engenders just these particular limitations, defects, and errors

and also what it is about that view which must deprive it of the resources required for

understanding, overcoming, and correcting them.”39 The seventh chapter, the one in which he

articulates his Special Theory in the last paragraph of the chapter, is entitled “The Apparent

Incompatibility of the Law of Propagation of Light with the Principle of Relativity.”40 By

articulating his theory at the end of a chapter describing an epistemological crisis within physics,

Einstein is intentionally presenting his theory as the resolution to a crisis, a resolution which

incorporates the previous Newtonian-Galilean system as a part of the history of Einstein’s own

theory. Again like Aquinas, he rejects Kuhn’s radical position that “Einstein’s theory can be

accepted only with the recognition that Newton’s was wrong,”41 but takes the further step to

17

39 Three Rival Versions 145-6

40 Einstein, table of contents in Relativity, rf. pg. 1-24 for the presentation of Einstein’s theory in a MacIntyrian way.

41 Kuhn, Structures, 98-9.

claim “that what is cogent, insightful, and true in [Newton’s] view can be incorporated within

[his] own view.”42

Replacing faith-based paradigm shifts with the construction of a historical narrative,

MacIntyre revises Kuhn’s ideas in order to preserve science as a rational process. Yet the

question of progress remains unaddressed directly by MacIntyre, at least directly. While he

resolves tension over Kuhn’s irrationality, “part of what is at issue is the question of what, if

anything, could be accounted such a resolution.”43 A resolution to crisis, that which counts as

progress, for Kuhn was the evolutionary specialization of the sciences. MacIntyre, however,

insists that not only is science directed towards a goal, but that the goal is a true understanding of

the world. MacIntyre says that “It is because and only because we can construct better and worse

histories of this kind, histories which can be rationally compared with each other, that we can

compare theories rationally too,”44 which means that the judgement of which history or theory is

better is a judgement about the truth. To choose one theory over another is to say that it is not just

better than the other theories, but also to say that it is a true theory. MacIntyre evidently does not

settle for Kuhn’s evolutionary theory in his response to him, but the question of progress for

MacIntyre is just as present as it is for Kuhn. The question, as it did Kuhn, forces a critical

examination of MacIntyre’s theory.

In order to be compared to one another, “it matters enormously that our histories should

be true, just as it matters that our scientific theories make truth one of their goals.”45 MacIntyre

18

42 MacInytre, Three Rival Versions, 145-6.

43 Ibid, 78.


45Ibid, 71-2.

says that the goal of science is the truth, and yet a common charge leveled at MacIntyre is that

these histories of revolutions in knowledge, including those for science, lead to the conclusion

that all truth is relative, for the truth arises from those histories and the comparison of those

histories with each other is essentially comparing different versions of the truth. A further

complication in MacIntyre’s theory is a response from Kuhn’s point of view: since MacIntyre’s

theories are compared as histories, and the resolution of crisis occurs through a rewriting of

history, then MacIntyre’s theory appears to fall right into the progressive accumulation theory of

scientific textbooks which Kuhn criticized so strongly as contradictory to the historical record.

Considering on what, if any, grounds Kuhn and MacIntyre would agree is the best place

from which to start making sense of the confusion over MacIntyre’s concept of progress, the

charges of relativism, and the difference between his theory and science by accumulation.

MacIntyre and Kuhn, though their process is different, both agree that any proper understanding

of science must conclude that science is not looking forward to the solidification of a single

paradigm or the escape from the cycle of scientific revolutions. They both agree that crisis and

revolutions occur in the practice of science, as well as the general insulation of the scientific

community as outlined above. Additionally, both Kuhn and MacIntyre formulate a process of

progress which is understood through history; they compare what we know now with what we

knew previously, and then come to their conclusions. MacIntyre would say, with Kuhn, that

“History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a

decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are no possessed.”46 History, then,

forms both thinkers’ understanding of science, but it transforms science into a different image for

19


both. Taking such a backward-looking, or historical, perspective on intellectual history in

science, it is apparent that Kuhn and MacIntyre both reject the model of science as an

accumulation of facts, as well as the model which claims that every scientist was looking at the

world in the same way.

Because Kuhn and MacIntyre both understand science through the lens of history but see

the historical record in a different way, the result of their theories then so different. Kuhn’s

understanding of history yielded his evolutionary record; MacIntyre’s understanding agreed with

his theory from Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry that crises are resolved by the

reconstruction of the historical narrative in a new and intelligible way. Both thinkers agree that

the question at the heart of science is not “How can we come to know what we do not know?”

but rather “How can we understand what we have discovered?” Kuhn thinks the truth is

unnecessary for understanding what we have discovered because, in fact, what we have

discovered through science does not “carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and

closer to the truth.”47

By critically analyzing Kuhn, demonstrating his flaws and revising his theory, MacIntyre

indirectly addresses the incoherence of Kuhn’s call for science to abandon the illusion of “one

full, objective, true account of nature.”48 He concludes that science must be progressing towards

the truth, but it is not the kind of truth which Kuhn rejects; rather, MacIntyre suggests that

science must always be in a relationship to the truth, and whenever that relationship breaks down

crisis happens. On account of Kuhn’s unintelligible claims about science and the truth,

MacIntyre steps into the role of Aquinas and Einstein, rewriting the narrative of historical

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47 Ibid, 169.

48 Ibid, 170.

criticism of science in order to make it intelligible again. And Kuhn’s claims are unintelligible,

for his view of science leads him to claim that “in some important respects...Einstein’s general

theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle’s than either of them is to Newton’s,”49 a relation which

is historically boggling, for it implies a kind of intelligibility between Aristotle and Einstein

without Newton. For MacIntyre this is impossible because “A history which moved from

Aristotelianism directly to relativistic physics is not an imaginable history.”50 Newton is in fact

necessary to understand both Aristotle and Einstein because they cannot be divorced from the

historical narrative in which they lived, thought, and developed; it is comparable to discussing

the American revolution without discussing British colonization. A coherent narrative of the

history of science needs each scientist to be historically connected in the same way America and

British colonization are connected, for this is what MacIntyre means by a true narrative of the

kind constructed by Aquinas, Einstein, and himself.

Along with Kuhn, MacIntyre is rejecting the progressive theory of science by

accumulation, but in doing so MacIntyre’s postition risks being seen as an endorsement of

relativism. Christopher Lutz, writing about MacIntyre’s theory as an alternative to relativism and

fideism, states the risk clearly:

Given that MacIntyre holds that each enquiry develops by its own standards, and that there is no standard of judgement independent of all traditions, does it not follow that if there are several different tradition-constituted enquiries, every claim to truth is relative to the tradition that makes it?51

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49 Ibid, 205.


51 Christopher Stephen Lutz, “Alasdair MacIntyre’s Tradition-Constituted Enquiry: An Alternative to Relativism and Fideism,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 85, no. 3 (2011): 400-1.

Kuhn answers a similar charge to relativism in the Postscript to Structures, positing perhaps that

science is exempt from relativism in ways that culture is not.52 He does, however, sound very

relativist when he says, “the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its ‘real’

counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle.”53 The same could be suggested of

MacIntyre, for MacIntyre agrees with Kuhn that there is “no theory-independent way to

reconstruct phrases like ‘really there.’”54 The construction of a narrative is inescapable for Kuhn,

MacIntyre, or any thinker, for there is always that “background of beliefs which render[s] what

he [is] doing intelligible and sane to himself and to others.”55 Because science and all the other

disciplines are rooted in history in this way, the charge of relativism requires a response in order

for MacIntyre himself to be “intelligible and sane to himself and to others.”

In light of MacIntyre’s other work, his position cannot be understood as relativist because

relativism is incompatible with the theory of crises and revolution with which he responds to

Kuhn. In other words, MacIntyre’s theory does not truly suggest relativism, but when connected

to his other work it actually contradicts any charge of relativism. Christopher Lutz, mentioned

earlier, explains that the charge of relativism “is not to be overcome by a simple turn to

epistemological absolutism, for there truly is something relative about the ways that we judge the

justice and truth of things.”56 Lutz has in mind the ethical and moral development which

MacIntyre articulates in both After Virtue and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, but the

same fact stands for the development of science through crises because the evaluation of theories

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53 Ibid, 205.

54 Ibid, 205.


56 Lutz, “Tradition-Constituted Enquiry,” 405.

is always in comparison to other theories. There is not an abstract idea of truth which exists

outside of the narrative to which the theory is compared, but rather to the other theories

available.

Hence, for MacIntyre the resolution of a crisis occurs not with the writing of “one full,

objective, true account of nature,” 57 but rather the best possible theory of those available. This

conclusion, however, demonstrates that “The unity of truth is a fundamental presupposition of all

enquiry.”58 Without a pre-conceived goal of truth which arises through the intelligibility of our

historical narrative it would be impossible to select, evaluate, or criticize another theory.59

MacIntyre hints at this with his example of the necessary continuity between Aristotle, Newton,

and Einstein: “an Einstein ontology enables us to understand is why from the standpoint of an

approach to truth Newtonian mechanics is superior to Aristotelian [mechanics]” precisely

because the “history which moved from Aristotelianism directly to relativistic physics is not an

imaginable history.”60 The only imaginable historical narrative, given what we know at this

moment in history, is that narrative which moves from Aristotle, through Galileo to Newton, and

then to Einstein.

Science, as a rational way of understanding the world, is an example of the way,

according to MacIntyre, in which all knowledge progresses. That progress, however, does not

approach a unitary view of the world that contains the sum of all knowledge, but it does

approach the truth in so far as it constructs a schema which enables rational beings to exist in a

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58 Lutz, “Tradition-Constituted Enquiry,” 406.



rational relationship with each other and the world around them. This schema, for schema is the

word MacIntyre himself uses, is never secure from crisis because it is itself the ground in which

all rational relationships exist. Because of that insecurity, though, progress within the pursuit of

knowledge is always possible through resolution of those future crises. So Kuhn was wrong to

conclude that the cycle of revolutions results in a divorce from the truth, because the case

actually stands that the cycle of revolutions ensures that we are always capable of maintaining

our relationship to the truth as well as our relationship to our experience.

What both MacIntyre and Kuhn have shown, however, is that a historical study of science

as well as all other disciplines concerned with understanding the world and ourselves has indeed

“produce[d] a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are no possessed.”61

Progressivist science, the accumulation of facts, was in need of a reformation. In the eighteenth

century, philosophy stood in a similar position. David Hume struck down philosophy and reason

itself form the throne on which it was placed by scholastic and speculative thought. There were

deep repercussion from Hume’s work, chiefly the apparent destruction of reason by Hume and

the crisis in philosophy caused by the rise of Hume’s skepticism. Stepping up to the challenge of

curing philosophy from both its previous ills and the sorry state in which Hume left it was

Immanuel Kant. Kant, starting with an acceptance of Hume’s criticism, went on to show how

metaphysics and philosophy were still very possible in spite of Hume’s work. Kuhn left science

in a state similar to the one in which Hume left philosophy; and then MacIntyre, in a reflection of

Kant’s project, clarified Kuhn’s legitimate criticism, corrected his flaws, and restored science to

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its proper calling. Both Kuhn and MacIntyre, then, testify to the power of history for

understanding science, and they give new life to the platitude that “history repeats itself.”

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Bibliography

1. Einstein, Albert. Relativity: The Special & General Theory, trans. Robert W. Lawson.

Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2001.

2. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2012.

3. Lutz, Christopher Stephen. “Alasdair MacIntyre’s Tradition-Constituted Enquiry: An

Alternative to Relativism and Fideism.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

85, no. 3 (2011): 391-413

4. MacIntyre, Alasdair. “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of

Science.” in Paradigms and Revolutions: Appraisals and Applications of Thomas

Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science, ed. Gary Gutting, 54-74. Notre Dame, IN: University

of Notre Dame Press, 1980.

5. MacIntyre, Alasdair. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and

Tradition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.

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Alasdair MacIntyre and Thomas Kuhn: Rationality and Progress in Science

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