What Are Scientific Revolutions?

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996) wrote extensively on the history of science, and developed several important notions in the philosophy of science. He is most famous for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in which he presented the idea that science does not "evolve gradually toward truth", but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he calls paradigm shifts. Kuhn's analysis of the history of science suggests to him that the practice of science comes in three phases. The first phase, which is undergone only once, is the pre-scientific phase, in which there is no consensus on any theory of explanation. This phase is generally characterized by several incompatible and incomplete theories.

What Are Scientific Revolutions?
  Thomas Kuhn

I first read some of Aristotle's physical writings in the summer of 1947, at which time I was a graduate student of physiccs trying to prepare a case study on the development of mechanics for a course in science for nonscientists. Not surprisingly, I approached Aristotle's texts with the Newtonian mechanics I had previously read clearly in mind. The question I hoped to answer was how much mechanics Aristotle had known, how much he had left for people like Galileo and Newton to discover. Given that formulation, I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all. Everything was left for his successors, mostly those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That conclusion was standard, and it might in principle have been right. But I found it bothersome because, as I was reading him, Aristotle appeared not only ignorant of mechanics, but a dreadfully bad physical scientist as well. About motion, in particular, his writings seemed to me full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation.

These conditions were unlikely. Aristotle, after all, had been the much admired codifer of ancient logic. For almost two millennia after his death, his work played the same role in logic tht Euclid's played in geometry. In addition, Aristotle had often proved an extraordinarily acute naturalistic observer. In biology, especially, his descriptive writings provided models that were central in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the emergence of the modern biological tradition. How could his characteristic talents have deserted him so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had so deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? Those questions troubled me. I could easily believe that Aristotle had stumbled, but not that, on entering physics, he had totally collapsed. Might not the fault be mine rather than Aristotle's, I asked myself. Perhaps his words had not always meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine.

Feeling that way, I continued to puzzle over the text, and my suspicions ultimately proved well-founded. I was sitting at my desk with the text of Aristotle's Physics open in front of me and with a four-colored pencil in my hand. Looking up, I gazed abstractedly out the window of my room -- the visual image is one I still retain. Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I'd never dreamed possible. Now I could understand why he had said what he'd said, and what his authority had been. Statements that had previously seemed egregious mistakes, now seemed at worst near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition. That sort of experience -- the pieces suddenly sorting themselves out and coming together in a new way -- is the first general characteristic of revolutionary change that I shall be singling out after further consideration of examples. Though scientific revolutions leave much piecemeal mopping up to do, the central change cannot be experienced piecemenal, one step at a time. Instead, it involves some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some part of the flux of experience sorts itself out differently and displays patterns that were not visible before.

To make all this more concrete let me know illustrate some of what was involved in my discovery of a way of reading Aristotelian physics, one that made the texts make sense. A first illustration will be familiar to many. When the term "motion" occurs in Aristotelian physics, it referes to change in general, not just to the change of position of a physical body. Change of position, the exclusive subject of mechanics for Galileo and Newton, is one of a number of subcategories of motion for Aristotle. Others include growth (the transformation of an acorn to an oak), alterations of intensity (the heating of an iron bar), and anumber of more general qualitative changes (the transition from sickness to health). As a result, though Aristotle recognizes that the various subcategories are not alike in all respects, the basic characteristics relevant to the recognition and analysis of motion must apply to changes of all sorts. In some sense that is not merely metaphorical, all varieties of change are seen as like each other, as constituting a single natural family.

A second aspect of Aristotle's physics -- harder to recognize and even more important -- is the centrality of qualities to its conceptual structure. By that I do not mean simply that it aims to explain quality and change of quality, for other sorts of physics have done that. Rather I have in mind that Aristotelian physics inverts the ontological hierarchy of matter and quality that has been standard since the middle of the seventeenth century. In Newtonian physics a body is constituted of particles of matter, and its qualities are a consequence of the way those particles are arranged, move, and interact. In Aristotle's physics, on the other hand, matter is very nearly dispensable. It is a neutral substrate, present wherever a body could be -- which means wherever there's space or place. A particular body, a substance, exists in whatever place this neutral substrate, a sort of sponge, is sufficiently impregnated with qualities like heat, wetness, color, and so on to give it individual identity. Change occurs by changing qualities, not matter, by removing some qualities from some given matter and replacing them with others. . . . .

[A]s one recognizes these and other aspects of Aristotle's viewpoint, they begin to fit together, to lend each other mutual support, and thus to make a sort of sense collectively that they individually lack. In my original experience of breaking into Aristotle's text, the new pieces I have been describing and the sense of their coherent fit actually emerged together.

Begin from the notion of qualitative physics that has just been sketched. When one analyzes a particular object by specifying the qualitites that have been imposed on omnipresent neutral matter, one of the qualities that must be specified is the object's position, or, in Aristotle's terminology, its place. Position is thus, like wetness or hotness, a quality of the object, one that changes as the object moves or is moved. Local motion (motion tout court in Newton's sense) is therefore change-of-quality or change-of-state fro Aristotle, rather than being itself a state as it is for Newton. But it is precisely seeing motion as change-of-quality that permits its assimilation to other sorts of change -- acorn to oak or sickness to health, for examples. . . . The conception of motion-as-change and the conception of a qualitative physics prove deeply interdependent, almost equivalent notions, and that is a first example of the fitting together or the locking together of parts.

If that much is clear, however, then another aspect of Aristotle's physics -- one that regularly seems ridiculous in isolation -- begins to make sense as well. Most changes of quality, especially in the organic realm, are asymmetric, at least when left to themselves. An acorn naturally develops into an oak, not vice versa. A sick man often grows healthy by himself, but an external agent is needed, or believed to be needed, to make him sick. One set of qualitites, one end point of change, represents a body's natural state, the one that it realizes voluntarily and thereafter rests. The same asymmetry should be [in Aristotle's thinking] characteristic of local motion, change of position, and indeed it is. [For Aristotle,] the quality that a stone or other heavy body strives to realize is position at the center of the universe; the natural position of fire is at the periphery. That is why stones fall toward the center until blocked by an obstacle and why fire flies to the heavens. They are realizing their natural properties just as the acorn does through its growth. Another initially strange part of Aristotelian doctrine begins to fallinto place. . . .

. . . Aristotle's doctrine about the vacuum or void . . . . displays with particular clarity the way in which a number of theses that appear arbitrary in isolation lend each other mutual authority and support. Aristotle states that a void is impossible: his underlying position is that the notion itself is incoherent. By now it should be apparent how that might be so. If position is a quality, and if qualities cannot exist separate from matter, then there must be matter wherever there's position, wherever body might be. But that is to say that there must be matter everywhere in space: the void, space without matter, acquires the status of a square circle.

That argument has force, but its premise seems arbitrary. Aristotle need not, one supposes, have conceived position as a quality. Perhaps, but we have already noted that that conception underlies his view of motion as change-of-state, and other aspects of his physics depend on it as well. If there could be a void, then the Aristotelian universe or cosmos could not be finite. It is just because matter and space are coextensive that space can end where matter ends, at the outermost sphere beyond which there is nothing at all, neither space nor matter. That doctrine, too, may seem dispensable. But expanding the stellar sphere to infinity would make problems for astronomy, since that sphere's rotations carry the stars about the earth [in the Ptolemaic cosmological system on which Aristotle relied.] Another, more central, difficulty arises earlier. In an infinite universe there is no center -- any point is as much the center as any other -- and thus there is no natural position at which stones and other heavy bodies realize their natural quality. Or, to put the point another way, one that Aristotle actually uses, in a void a body could not be awre of the location of its natural place. It is just be being in contact with all positions in the universe through a chain of intervening matter that a body is able to find its way to the place where its natural qualities are fully realized. The presence of matter is what provides space with structure. Thus, both Aristotle's theory of natural local motion and ancient geocentric astronomy are threatened by an attack on Aristotle's doctrine of the void. There is no way to "correct" Aristotle's views about the void without reconstructing much of the rest of his physics.

Those remarks, though both simplified and incomplete, should sufficiently illustrate the way in which Aristotelian physics cuts up and describes the phenomenal world. Also, and more important, they should indicate how the pieces of that description lock together to form an integral whole, one that had to be broken and reformed on the road to Newtonian mechanics.

From The Probablistic Revolution, Volume I: Ideas in History, eds. Lorenz Kruger, Lorraine, J. Daston, and Michael Heidelberger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), excerpt from pp. 7-22.