- But the pipe could be carrying water only to the taps of fellow insiders, and then somebody put a naughty hole in it on purpose, meaning those who weren’t supposed to get any drops did.

Re: Kuhn

- Lots of Frenchies are already writing in this area. Foucault brings out The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969, and had already written Birth of Clinic, Madness and Civilisation, and the Order of Things by then. Satre was well established. Over in the German speaking lands, the influence of Nietzsche had a big impact pre-WWII via Weber, Heidegger and Schmitt. Obviously, post-National Socialism anything Nietschean was heavily tainted (unfairly), but the ideas that lead to socially-constructed power bases determining agents’ thought processes and outcomes had been knocking around well before 1962. Kuhn read masters-level philosophy at Harvard, and would have been aware of a lot of this stuff.

Bear in mind also that socially-organised and influenced aspects of the later Wittgenstein, and the subsequent language-games analysis that came to dominate analytic (i.e. Harvard-style) philosophy from the 1950s-70s.

But aside from all that intellectual history, I reckon there’s a bigger explanation for the genesis of Kuhn’s paradigm power-structure (if we’re going to go that far) type approach: he – with everyone else in America – had just witnessed Macarthyism in full swing.

On Kuhn, I’ll happily concede that I didn’t have the book in front of me, and that you may be right about how far Kuhn actually goes. Having said that, I think the leap from the existence of ‘group-commitment’ to the reason for the existence of ‘group commitment’ being tied to the power mechanisms I identify is not huge, and not unwarranted.

Historiographically, you do though raise an interesting point. Kuhn was writing in the early 1960s before a lot of the more modern, Marxian-infuenced power analysis stuff, most notably Lukes’ three faces of power stuff (1970?) had come out and, related to this before Gramsci was widely available and doing its influence stuff (not that Kuhn would have been open to such direct influence). It’d be interesting to read Kuhn again (and as you suggest, his later stuff) with a specific eye to what he’s NOT influenced by, if you see what I mean.

1. Of course something can be leaked without having been scheduled for public release at some point. Think of the leaking of classified government documents (e.g. over the first Iraq war), which were never meant for public viewing. You’re of course right that these emails were stolen not leaked, but your definition of leak is wrong

2. Having just read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions I’m compelled to inform you that he doesn’t explore “how scientific progress can never be divorced from political and financial influences”. He does explore how “(absolute) truth” in science is an illusory ideal, how intellectual prejudices, group-commitments and established orthodoxies influence the development of scientific “paradigms”, and so on. And many people have inferred that this leads to a reading of science as unaviodably conditioned by political influence and financial string-pulling (and Kuhn himself may state this in later works), but that claim is not actually in Structure.

Aside from the nit picking, very good post.

I have some thoughts about why we’re all fucked here:

http://badconscience.com/2009/12/03/you-die/

and I break the news that Nigel Lawson was a brutal 1970s murderer roaming the streets of Venice, here:

http://badconscience.com/2009/12/04/what-do-you-expect/