A Philosopher's Call to End All Paradigms

Steve Fuller says academics have no idea how new ideas are really created

By JEFF SHARLET

Friends and enemies alike call Steve Fuller a loose cannon, a troublemaker in a half-dozen fields -- philosophy, sociology, the history of science among them. In person, he appears most of all as if possessed.

Not just because he seems to dance a hurdy-gurdy jig when he presents a paper, legs crossing and twisting, torso dodging and weaving, his

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hair not so much thinning as clinging to his scalp in an attempt to stay attached to a body in perpetual motion. Even when he's sitting, a strange spirit animates Mr. Fuller as he talks to, and on behalf of, ghosts.

He regularly channels long-dead thinkers, extending their views by precise but complicated steps into the debates of today. "What would Newton say about modern physics?" he demands in a conversation, then provides an answer (in short, nothing good).

"Hegel would not be pleased," he writes of a contemporary philosopher's work on progress and history, then goes on to list the ways in which the dialectician would have disapproved.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Fuller's ghosts often say what he'd say himself; Hegel, apparently, has developed a Brooklyn accent in the afterlife. But even if Mr. Fuller's supernatural think tank is as questionable as his critics charge, few dispute the erudition or the ambition of the program of reform his specters are summoned to endorse.

Mr. Fuller, a philosopher at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, England, wants to change the way most people today absorb new ideas and dispose of old ones.

You could say he's looking for a paradigm shift -- but the very concept of paradigms is exactly what Mr. Fuller believes is holding us back from a smarter and better world.

In his new book, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (University of Chicago Press), he charges that Kuhn, the man most responsible for the use and abuse of the term paradigm (138 articles in the last three years of this paper alone used the word to explain everything from the structure of knowledge to the love lives of administrators), was an accidental cold warrior; and that his most famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), a bestseller still taught across the disciplines, is in fact a defense of Big Science and the suppression of free inquiry.

Mr. Fuller is for the equal consideration of all ideas, not just those that fit within paradigms. He'll listen to flat-earthers (although he knows the earth is round) and he admires creationists for their gumption (he himself is an evolutionist). To do anything less would be undemocratic, he says.

Some would call Mr. Fuller's approach to knowledge anarchy. He calls it "social epistemology."

Now a common phrase in a variety of fields, social epistemology sprang from Mr. Fuller's mind nearly full-grown when he published his first book, Social Epistemology (Indiana University Press), 12 years ago. The term may sound like longhand for relativism, the notion that we construct our knowledge rather than find it raw in nature. But to Mr. Fuller, that is neither here nor there. So knowledge is socially constructed; so what?

"For me and at the end of the day, the really crucial question for scholars, for everybody, is one of governance," he says. Not how to produce knowledge, but how to use it.

During the last decade, Mr. Fuller has been refining his plan for the further democratization of knowledge (a word he uses, Enlightenment-fashion, as interchangeable with "science"). But with Thomas Kuhn and another book published this year, both of which have already sparked heated discussion throughout the social and natural sciences, Mr. Fuller has upped the ante and named names. Of his new books, he says, "You could call them manifestoes." His dream is best described as a radical revision of higher education and a call to intellectual arms: Arise ye prisoners of paradigms, for you have nothing to lose but your chains.

Mr. Fuller is no Marxist. As a historian, he says he's a tory, convinced that we ignore the lessons of the past at our peril. As a political thinker, he calls himself a republican dedicated to consensus.

But if there's any consensus in academe, it's over the importance of the book Mr. Fuller seeks to debunk. Structure, as it's usually referred to by scholars, has sold nearly a million copies in 20 different languages. It is one of the most frequently cited works in both the humanities and the social sciences. And it has countless adherents beyond academe: New Age prophets, business gurus, and politicos across the spectrum. Newt Gingrich called his 1994 right-wing "revolution" a paradigm shift, after one of Kuhn's key concepts. Al Gore says Structure is his favorite book, and promises to draw heavily on it if he wins the Oval Office.

Mr. Fuller first encountered Kuhn's creed as a freshman at Columbia University, in 1976. He'd enrolled as a scholarship student, the only child of a seamstress and a traveling salesman, a half-Jewish graduate of Jesuit schools he says influenced him with their tradition of relentless questioning as much as almost anything he encountered in the less-holy halls of academe. Anything but Structure, which Mr. Fuller read as one of two books by living authors on a mandatory "Classics of Contemporary Civilization" reading list.

At the time, Kuhn helped set Mr. Fuller on the road that would lead to his new book. He originally read Structure as a liberatory tale of pluralism, a history of scientific revolutions that was in itself revolutionary. Even today, many scholars recall the rush of reading Kuhn's seemingly prim and modest first sentence: "History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science."

The effect of that sentence and those that followed was transformative. Student activists seized on Kuhn's view of how new ideas took hold as a model for radical change. Social scientists used it to validate their own fields. And some natural scientists even seemed at last willing to concede that the context of their experiments was as important as the experiments themselves. By the time Mr. Fuller read Structure, he might have said with no great exaggeration, "We are all Kuhnians now."

Structure proposed a model for seeing history as a bumpy path from puzzle to puzzle, going nowhere in particular. Every so often a genius makes a startling discovery that sets the tone for the lesser men (for Kuhn, science was a world of men) who follow in his wake, running ever-more specialized experiments to fill out the genius's picture of reality. Together, this effort constitutes what Kuhn called a paradigm.

Kuhn's paradigms are like very spacious boxes, with plenty of room in which to roam and tinker. Once a sufficient number of problems within the paradigm are solved, individuals begin to detect anomalies. At which point, another genius arises to precipitate a paradigm shift, or scientific revolution. Resistance to new ideas -- to the concept of orbits, for instance -- gives way like a dam breaking. The water rushing in is the new world-view, using up all the intellectual air in the room. Kuhn called the complete displacement of one paradigm by another "incommensurability."

In academe, the fact that anything could be, or at least was, called a paradigm allowed for the disciplinization of a variety of fields, especially in the social sciences, which had long been considered too subjective. Beyond academe, the concept of paradigms articulated for many a sense that progress -- the very notion that Kuhn had intended to dismiss -- required a world-view, and that the best way to adopt new ideas was quickly and drastically. Paradigms were faster than democracy, bigger than simple procedure, and stronger than a history cluttered with failed ideas.

In the early 1970's, the paradigm concept caught hold so quickly that New Yorker cartoons poked fun at its prevalence. The question of the day (and a joke popular with theory geeks and student revolutionaries) was, "Brother, can you paradigm?"

According to Mr. Fuller, a funny thing happened to Thomas Kuhn on the way to the scientific revolution: He became a reactionary.

"Science according to Kuhn is basically an authoritarian community," he explains. "So there's a paradigm. And you've got the keeper of the paradigm, the department heads and so on. So what happens to you as a scientist? You become acculturated, and you apprentice with these guys, and you become certified to do science. And that's what you do, in a protected space, for the rest of your life. Filling out the world picture behind the paradigm.

"There's nothing democratic about the process at all. It's rather a process of unconditional commitment."

At the beginning of Thomas Kuhn, Mr. Fuller likens him to Chance the gardener, the hero of the 1979 film Being There, a simpleton misunderstood as a prophet who winds up as president of the United States, all the while denying that he'd meant to say anything profound, much less political.

Likewise, Kuhn spent most of his post-Structure life either maintaining a serene silence or batting away the political implications of his book. According to Mr. Fuller, that's because Kuhn was never much more than a mouthpiece for his mentor at Harvard, James B. Conant. Kuhn described Conant as the smartest man he'd ever met, besides his father.

Conant was part of a group of men considered at the time to be "action-intellectuals." A chemist by training, a frequent contributor of weighty essays on civic matters to magazines like The Atlantic Monthly, and president of Harvard University from 1933 to '53, Conant introduced the young scholar to the history of science, a discipline Kuhn naively saw as aware of the world and yet self-contained.

But as a key player in the creation of both the atomic bomb and the National Science Foundation, Conant was a savvy and self-conscious cold warrior. When Kuhn began formulating the ideas that led to Structure, under Conant's guidance, and when Conant read the pages as Kuhn wrote them, he immediately recognized not only the political implications, but the utility of the world-view Kuhn was proposing.

They'd first met when the Harvard president recruited Kuhn as an instructor in his general-education program. Both men believed that there existed a gap between the public and science. Their solution was to bring the public closer to science, rather than science closer to the public, through a curriculum that emphasized appreciation of and respect for the incomprehensible work of one's intellectual betters.

Closer, but not too close. Conant subscribed to the Platonic notion of a "noble lie." Plato's republic consisted of a two-tiered system of knowledge, the theologically based truth for public consumption, and the metaphysical perception of the nature of things reserved for the wisest of the wise. To Conant, that division translated especially well into the cold-war world, though in his thinking, it evolved more explicitly into a double-truth doctrine that might have been drawn just as easily from George Orwell's 1984 as from The Republic.

Around the time Conant plucked Kuhn from an unhappy obscurity as a not-quite-top budding physicist, Conant was serving on the Committee on the Present Danger, the anti-Communist Washington group formed by Paul Nitze, Eugene Rostow, and other well-known hawks.

To Conant, that threat lay not so much in Moscow as close to home. He feared the G.I. Bill would hopelessly dilute the new, knowledge-based universities he was designing to replace what had once been finishing schools for the well-born. And he feared that "too much" democratic oversight of science would prevent American research from competing with less publicly-accountable Soviet technology.

Both Conant and Kuhn hoped the creation of the National Science Foundation, in which Conant played an instrumental role, would go a long way toward carving out a space for "basic research," or science unfettered by social concerns. But Kuhn, intrigued by the difficulties of teaching enough science to his students to make them accepting supporters of it, but not so much as to make them critical and demanding citizens, began to wonder just how knowledge was transmitted, how science could survive the constant onslaught of competing social concerns.

In Structure, the result of this curiosity, Kuhn credits Conant with introducing him to the central ideas of his argument. And indeed, paradigms seem to fit in well with the world of Big Science -- cold-war science -- Conant and the present-danger theorists were busy creating.

Even what looked like Kuhn's most radical point -- that while scientists labored within paradigmatic confines, philosophers of science were able to discern more historical perspectives -- is essentially Plato's double-truth doctrine.

Kuhn, says Mr. Fuller, so internalized this doctrine that in Structure he projected it backward into history and forward into theory. In short, he made the conditions necessary for cold-war science synonymous with those necessary for natural science.

Based on Conant's private papers, Mr. Fuller argues that Conant was well aware of the convenience of the double-truth doctrine for the cold war. For Conant, the imperatives of the cold war licensed "mild forms of irrationality," such as arms races, to stave off the chaos of all-out conflict. In Kuhn's view, science actually needed mild irrationality, in the form of a rejection of ideas outside the given paradigm, to prevent the chaos inherent in overly free inquiry.

Moreover, writes Mr. Fuller, "because the Cold War constructed the world as an 'either/or' rather than a 'both/and' moral sphere, Conant could not accept the compatibility of a stable social order and regularly occurring social criticism." Kuhn translated this intolerance into "incommensurability."

Conant believed in never looking back once a decision had been made. The communist barbarians were at the gate; there was no time for reflection. The curriculum he designed incorporated "no regrets" as a key legacy of the Western intellectual tradition. Kuhn, one of the first men to teach that curriculum, followed suit in Structure a few years later with the concept of paradigm shift. Scientists working within paradigms, he said, simply don't bother with leftovers from the last one.

Leftovers like the idea that social utility should be part of research protocol, says Mr. Fuller. "Structure," he writes, "does not so much transcend the Cold War mentality as express it in a more abstract, and hence more portable form."

So portable that the book Kuhn claimed he'd intended for a small audience of specialists became a bible of sorts across the disciplines. Indeed, says Mr. Fuller, it helped create disciplines, especially his own specialty, the philosophy of science. But even that field, which rests on the idea of critiquing the assumptions of science, is so "Kuhnified" that it can't really see the ideology beyond the paradigm. Or in Mr. Fuller's terms, the ought beyond the is.

"Criticism rests on the idea that the ideal is separate from what science is, and that you can use the ideal as a lever for change." he says. "But the tendency in science studies" -- and by extension, all of social science -- "is to use the way science actually is to critique the ideal as ideology. People saw that as a great, demystifying move. They say, 'Science claims to be critical, but we see that really they operate like this.' But then they don't take the further move to say, 'Oh, that's bad'; they just say, 'That's all science is. And if we want to be a science, we have to work like that, too. Science is for sheep, and so I go baa!'"

Mr. Fuller once dreamed of being a college president himself. He admires Conant's clear-minded pursuit of his goals, even as he despises the goals themselves. And despite his attitude toward what he sees as the sheep of academe, he's convinced that universities are the ideal place from which to effect change in the way knowledge moves throughout the world.

In The Governance of Science (Open University Press), published just a few months before Thomas Kuhn, Mr. Fuller offers a plan for his new school. To begin with, he says, government must complete the great project of secularization begun in the Enlightenment. As long as government finances knowledge-production, argues Mr. Fuller, that knowledge will be bent to the will of whatever government is in charge.

He's not so naive as to believe that governments easily cede power, but he thinks that our current age of globalization provides an opportunity for secularists opposed to state science. In the absence of a cold war, he argues, free markets are seizing knowledge-production from governments and throwing it up for grabs. Mr. Fuller believes that universities now stand as the best alternative to big business -- provided they make some drastic reforms.

Ideally, they will forgo money from the state tagged for specific projects or fields. Instead, the alumni-giving model should become a principle of democracy rather than a side-effect of nostalgia. As universities expand their utility to a public bigger than their own student bodies, they should ask for and receive more voluntary support -- money that will allow them to wean themselves off military-industrial financing.

The university, says Mr. Fuller, will also offer a balance to the power of the market. Of greater value than innovation is reverse engineering. "As far as I'm concerned, the Japanese have got it right. Figure out how to make things, and make them cheaper for everyone."

Mr. Fuller's views exhibit an unusual blend of utilitarian thinking and Foucaultian philosophy. Information locked in an ivory tower isn't really knowledge for its own sake, he argues, because it has the practical effect of increasing the power of its guardians.

By that rationale, teaching trumps research. Distribution of knowledge justifies its production. Skeptics wonder if that wouldn't result in more resources for popular topics that might be considered "luxury learning," staples of most adult education such as swing dancing or cooking with a wok.

Mr. Fuller's reply is sanguine: Let the people decide. He believes that our education system is so dependent on the opinions of "experts" -- Kuhn's keepers of paradigms -- that most people can't even imagine what democratic learning would look like. Given the option to decide for themselves, he is confident that a sufficient number of people would want to study weighty topics rather than forfeit control of their lives to those who do.

Broadening access to all kinds of knowledge will help expand another key role of universities, he says: the testing of new discoveries and theories. A scientist who makes a discovery in physics will have to explain it to colleagues in sociology (and vice versa). A supercollider that makes perfect sense to people in one field, for instance, may appear to those in another as harebrained. Its supporters would be forced to improve their presentation or reconceptualize the goals of their research and the meaning of their results.

Public "consensus conferences" will decide how to translate knowledge into action after it's been discovered and distributed. Rabid wrestling fans setting policy on missile defense? Consensus is more complicated than rule by the lowest common denominator.

Mr. Fuller's "citizens' juries" will consist of broad cross sections of the public, who will be given the necessary time and information to set not so much policy as policy guidelines. Scientists will have to master the art of rhetoric to make their cases to those forums. And while their expertise will be respected, it won't outweigh the expertise in citizenship Mr. Fuller's schools will inculcate in us all.

But the basic knowledge needed to participate in governance is already there, he says. Even The Rock can comment knowledgeably on whether or not he wants a nuclear power plant in his backyard.

"Part of the problem with Steve is he has at least graduate-level facility in a dozen fields," says William Keith, a professor of rhetoric at Oregon State University who sat on a panel at a conference last fall to discuss Mr. Fuller's The Governance of Science. "And when he's racing from one thinker to the next, he sort of assumes you do, too. That makes it hard to evaluate some of his best arguments."

"Reading Fuller is like reading Umberto Eco on speed," says Jeff Hughes, a historian of science at the University of Manchester who delivered a paper at a panel dedicated to Thomas Kuhn at a conference this past August. Mr. Fuller, he says, moves so fast that he makes one of the same mistakes Kuhn does: He takes a monolithic view of the history-of-science field, just as Kuhn did of practicing science.

"Paradigmitis" is a very real disease, says Mr. Hughes, and it will require as many cures as it has manifestations.

"You want to deconstruct Steve a little bit?" asks Paul A. Roth, a philosopher at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. "OK, now we're in the age of entrepreneurs. No more cold war, no more big government spending. And lo and behold, Steve says, 'Let's make science libertarian.'"

Philip J. Mirowski, a historian of science at the University of Notre Dame who also spoke at the August conference asked, "Wouldn't it be poetic justice to discover that having established that Kuhn could not set the terms for the reception of his book, nor control its ultimate message, Fuller found that he can no more transcend his context either?"

Fortunately for Mr. Fuller, he doesn't believe he has to. "I don't need to say how everything's going to be," he insists. "That's not what democracy is about. It's a process, not a paradigm."

Nor does he view the unwieldiness of the democratic process as a defect. Paradigms always value the present over the past only because it's efficient to do so, he says, not because discarded ideas have been fully explored.

"And besides," he points out, "people have the right to be wrong."

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