2.4 (October 2002): 334-357
© 2002 National Communication Association

The Philosopher of Science As Public Intellectual

John Angus Campbell

Steve Fuller. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 472 pages. $35.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).

In the introduction to Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophic History For Our Time, Steve Fuller makes the uncontroversial claim “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . . . is probably the best known academic book of the second half of the twentieth century.” A claim I believe will be equally uncontroversial for any one who reads it is that Fuller’s book is far better than Kuhn’s, deserves a reception as wide and a legacy as influential. In one of his many earlier books, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge: The Coming of Science and Technology Studies, Fuller presented his scholarly and civic agenda: an indictment of big science, a call for a view of science policy informed by history and philosophy yet responsive to cultural norms, civic traditions, and democratic governance. Thomas Kuhn advances the same agenda. What has changed is the context of the argument. While the earlier book announced a program, this one diagnoses what went wrong—why social scientists and philosophers who study science have become co-opted by their own fixation on professionalization, are ignored by scientists as well as policy makers, are advocates for science as it is, and have failed to be critics let alone prophets and public advocates for how science ought to be. In a review of Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge, I noted, “Fuller is no man of peace.”[1] What I wrote as a description of his earlier book could serve equally well as a prophecy for his latest. The polemical spirit that enlivens Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge is fully evident in Thomas Kuhn. One can only hope that this volume will not be so smothered with praise for its meticulous intellectual history, that its radical agenda for science studies will be politely ignored by those against whom its irresistible venom is so copiously and effervescently directed.

 While placing Fuller in intellectual context is beyond the scope of this review, a signpost at least is in order. Intellectually, and though writing in a very different style and era, Fuller’s godfather is Karl Popper. The Thomas Kuhn of Thomas Kuhn directly parallels the Plato of The Open Society and Its Enemies. Fuller shares with Popper not so much a philosophy in the propositional sense as a rhetoric, a set of common topics on the vocation of the philosopher as public intellectual and the need for the philosopher to be a social critic and demystifier of philosophy and science. The parallel is particularly evident in Fuller’s persistent call for philosophers to stop being apologists for establishment science, to start empowering laypersons as partners in deliberation along with “experts” on all matters of science policy, and to help create a truly “Republican Science”—a science fully rooted in the civic traditions of democracy and jealous of its deliberative norms. While The Open Society and Its Enemies was a philosophic spine-stiffener for academics, intellectuals, and educated laypeople during WWII (Popper’s book was begun in 1938 and published in 1943) Fuller is not defending anything so square as “western civilization” against barbarians from without and traitors from within. Fuller is pleasingly post-modern in his manner and his inclusive social sensibilities while being utterly free of the cant, humorlessness, dogmatism, directionless relativism, and unreadability that characterizes almost every post-modern figure one can think of. (Stanley Fish is the only visible post-modern who cares enough about the public to insult liberal democratic traditions in a lively and intelligible manner). Yet for all his being “with it” Fuller has also “had it”—not with his enemies but with his friends and natural allies who consider themselves radicals while being little more than a reactionary establishment of bulimic grant grabbers who cultivate a mystifying prose the effect of which is to exclude the public from any significant participation in forming science policy. As the founding editor of Social Epistemology and as an academic entrepreneur, international coalition maker, and wall-breaker-downer par excellence, Fuller is a real radical who, like Popper, is capable of hope. And he has the courage—for it cannot be naivete—to believe that, if properly challenged, his philosophic, scientific, and sociological colleagues will reclaim the radical heritage that is rightfully theirs. As Popper traced the roots of western authoritarianism to Plato, so Fuller traces the false radicalism and objective social quietism of science studies to Kuhn. In the tradition of Popper, Fuller is nothing if not a doctor of epistemic ills and his book is a 423 page etiology of “Kuhnification”—a term one hopes the O.E.D. will soon list in its on-line edition. The definition would read: “Kuhnification, a disease of late twentieth-century philosophers and social scientists, symptoms are a collective sense of historical amnesia and political inertia, which together define a syndrome . . . paradigmitis (based on Fuller, 318) .”

Wit: Signature of the Fullerian Style

Since, thanks to one really helpful impact of post-modernism, style is now properly regarded as an aspect of “substance,” there is no better place to begin examination of Fuller than with his “style”—considered here loosely as his distinctive manner of expression including his “wit.” For a thinker who carefully analyzes the contexts of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, its points of genesis and reception—but who never, in the spirit of “close reading,” parses its text—Fuller takes great pains in his own writing. Fuller is that rare intellectual who can summarize and address truly weighty philosophic, sociological, and historical topics with a deftness that seems effortless and a persuasiveness that makes his own position seem obvious. His writing is fluid and studded with insight expressed in arresting one-liners and unforgettable caricatures of opponents, arranged in a compelling narrative punctuated with passages of spectacular invective. Though it places too great an emphasis on improvisation—a skill that the living man possesses in profligate abundance—for want of a better term one is tempted to characterize him as a stand-up philosopher.

Fuller’s signature skill is to cast ponderous topics into a form that is at once humorous and profound. The affect of his art is to drive home his point while simultaneously goading his reader to read on. A good illustration is his manner of couching a central thesis of Thomas Kuhn—the unfortunate attitude toward history that the Structure of Scientific Revolutions has encouraged among scientists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science. In place of offering his reader the standard division of historical schools into “Tory,” a normative view of history lamenting wrong turns, lost causes, and falls from grace, and “Whig” history written to justify the present (the twentieth-century historian Herbert Butterfield coined the term)—Fuller offers his own tripartite division of Tory, Whig, and Prig! Prig history is a guild mentality in which relativism, rather than being a tactic of historical analysis, requires the permanent suspension of all normative judgments on the part of the historian, including critical reflection on the use and political/cultural implications of his or her own work. Such historians, Fuller notes, surely have political and social values concerning the meaning and preferred ends served by the material articulated by their labors—they just refuse to say what they are. Despite the conservative provenance of the term Fuller identifies himself as a Tory and Kuhn and Kuhnians as Prigs (24, 25). Though Fuller appropriately complicates his terms by pointing out how “Prig history is the result of Tory history forgetting is own historical origins,” his qualification is itself a memorable formulation and despite the nuances of his accompanying explanation leaves the reader an unforgettable caricature (damning to his opponents) by which to grasp an opposition that will structure his entire argument.

The title of his first chapter “The Pilgrimage from Plato to NATO: Episodes in Embushelment” is itself humorous and intriguing. On one level the title is a kind of Popperian reverse pun in which the sinister connotations of the state science of the axis powers and of the communists, all of which Popper associated with Plato, have now been taken over by the equally statist and undemocratic science of the west. On another level “Pilgrimage” coupled with the Biblical echoes of “bushel” in “embushelment” announces a theme of spiritual journey—but suggests a quest that has gone terribly awry. In fact “Embushelment”—a term of Fullerian coinage—is a key not only to the chapter but to much of the book. “Embushelment” in the first instance is anchored in the gospel story of Jesus’ admonition to his disciples not to hide their light under a bushel basket out of fear of the social consequences of proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom. But Fuller casts this flexible, well reticulated term ecumenically over both the Greek and the Hebrew sides of the western tradition. “Embushelment” in Fuller’s hands includes the legacy of Athens as well as of Jerusalem. What Eric Voegelin required two terms for (and which he identified with two rather different aspects of consciousness) the “noetic” differentiation of consciousness characteristic of the Greeks and the “pneumatic” characteristic of the Hebrews, Fuller encompasses in a single word denoting two distinct but related aspects of western “reason.”[2] From a dichotomy that subsequently will yield all kinds of subtle, unexpected turns and inter-relationships Fuller sketches a narrative Tom Painean in its unambiguous surface structure, Lyotardian in its delirious ironies, Lacanian in its return to themes modernism and post modernism have repressed, and Hegelian in its historical/intellectual and dialectical scope. What is most disheartening about Fuller is that his previews of his own argument are so lucid the reviewer, out of sheer poverty of invention, must periodically surrender to him even the humble function of summation. As Fuller presents them the two western tracks of reason are as follows.

The first track extends from Socratic questioning in the Athenian forum through the Enlightenment to Ernst Mach and Karl Popper. It is critical, libertarian, and risk seeking—and it also seems to be the track that Jesus himself espoused. The second track extends from the cloistered setting of Plato’s Academy through positivism . . . to Max Planck and Thomas Kuhn. It is foundational, authoritarian, and risk averse—and it also characterizes the track with which institutional Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church, has often identified. (38, 39)

The themes adumbrated in the introduction and opening pages of chapter 1 are unfolded by a narrative that increasingly prepares the reader for the radical reassessment of Kuhn and his tradition set forth in the conclusion. In Fuller’s chapters, arranged to create and satisfy his readers mounting expectation that the single most visible and omni-influential monument of recent intellectual history is about to be exploded—and the fragments pulverized—there is something novelesque, or better, almost Demosthenically oratorical. From chapter 1, “The Pilgrimage From Plato to NATO,” which we have already sampled, the reader is ushered into chapter 2, the dispute between Mach and Planck over the nature and social obligations of science aptly entitled “The Last time Scientists Struggled For the Soul of Science.” It is not really until chapters 3 and 4, “The Politics of the Scientific Image in the Age of Conant” and “From Conant’s Education Strategy To Kuhn’s Research Strategy” that Kuhn—whose thought is always discussed as an implication of the legacy of larger figures—really steps to the center of the stage in the book the title of which is his name. But this is exactly the point of Fuller’s subtitle, “A Philosophic History For Our Times.” In this history Kuhn is a late, derivative, and almost accidental figure. Only in chapter 5, “How Kuhn Unwittingly Saved Social Science From a Radical Future,” does Fuller unequivocally focus on Kuhn. By then the reader is well prepared for the moral of the story set forth in chapter 6, “The World Not Well Lost: Philosophy After Kuhn,” and chapter 7, “Kuhnification as Ritualized Political Impotence: The Hidden history of Science Studies.” Chapter 7 is what Kuhn, drawing from his airforce experience in World War II, might have called a “mopping up” operation. Here Fuller examines the fate of the fields, particularly those closest to his heart concerned with the social study of science, that have taken Kuhn seriously. The final chapter—the only one with a title written in a parsimoniously plain style—”Conclusions”—is really the crown of the work and shows the unsparing consistency of Fuller both as a stylist and as a thinker. The title of the conclusion, of course, is a stylistic feint for the Fullerian baroque immediately exfoliates in the gorgeous abundance of subtitles that pyrotechnically illuminate this, his peroration: “1. The Canonization of Saint Thomas Kuhn,” “2. A Career of Lucky Accidents and Studied Avoidance,” “3. The Secularization of Paradigms as Movements,” “4. High and Low Church Secularization of Science,” “5. Reinventing the University by Rediscovering the Contexts of Discovery and Justification,” “6. Final Strategic Remarks.” As these subtitles should clearly indicate, Fuller is no Prig. Having identified himself as a left-wing Tory and a successor to all that is best in positivism, Fuller does not hesitate to assess why Kuhn has led the academy down a wrong path or to offer prescriptions for how philosophy, science, history, and the compact between the university and the larger culture ought to be rewritten in a democratic, egalitarian, and distinctly rhetorical direction.

No consideration of Fuller’s style would be complete without at least one sample of his incisive invective. My favorite is from chapter 7 where he opens up on what he sees as Kuhn’s disastrous legacy for Science and Technology Studies. “A work as broad and speculative as Kuhn’s Structure could not have survived peer review in contemporary STS, which has come to expect case studies cloaked in a strong empiricist rhetoric, with ‘theoretical reflection’ amounting to token genuflection to the field’s immediate founders and a sprinkling of their more aromatic verbal droppings” (321). Then, following a sober, indented, reduced-type, bullet-point summation of his indictment (another Fullerian stylistic signature), he concludes a follow-on and otherwise straight-laced paragraph, “But exactly what was Structure’s role in this hardening of the intellectual arteries?” (322) I am unaware of scholarly writing of this caliber focused on a public document of this import since H. L. Mencken reviewed Harding’s Inaugural. The same three point movement: salvo “it reminds me of a string of wet sponges . . . of tattered washing on the line . . . of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad a certain grandeur creeps into it”; false change of front, “But I grow lyrical. More scientifically, what is wrong with it?”; and then return of the oh-so-lightly repressed, “Why does it seem so flabby, so banal, so  . . . stupidly at war with sense?”—is all here.[3] If you want to experience an original thinker who also knows how to have a rollicking good time with words, buy this book for the sheer joy of reading it. Fuller is arguably not only the best philosopher of the rhetoric of science he is—hands down—its best practicing, and its only gorgeously Gorgianic, rhetorician!

Fuller’s Anti-paradigm Shift

Considerations of form to one side, Thomas Kuhn is both a disavowal of one of the most central recent intellectual legacies of our time and a reconstruction of an alternative. Drawing on the model of Thucydides as one motivated to think by the experience of defeat Fuller positions Kuhn as the ultimate legatee of the anti-democratic and anti-rhetorical heritage of philosophy that stemmed from the victory of Sparta over Athens. He positions himself as a spokesman for the line of tradition that draws a democratic moral from the same event. One of his earliest and most fundamental moves is to claim democratic deliberation and the rough and tumble of the public sphere as the most appropriate and secure ground for the nurturing of science—indeed for creating the social and cognitive conditions for “objectivity” itself. What is at issue here for Fuller is not just the fate of science but of a democratic science appropriate for an open society. Paralleling a theme of Popper, Fuller urges that in an “open society” science must be open to, and grounded in, the civic norms of its culture. Indeed he urges that the fate of democracy and of science, and the true long-range interests of both, coincide. While requiring expertise, science, Fuller argues, has no license to ordain a priesthood of experts whose superior knowledge allows them to impose their professionally certified “truth” on society. As I read him, what Fuller would take from the legacy of Plato and Aristotle is the notion of norms, but he wants to locate those norms not in some transcendent sphere or in an abstracted “reason,” but in the deliberative life of a truly pluralistic democratic community. His inclusion of Jesus in the western tradition of “reason” is no mere piety. While Fuller is friendly to pragmatism, when he speaks of reason in community he is no Rortean who wishes to “achieve our country” by praising Whitman and consigning the themes of Lincoln’s second inaugural to polite literary discussion where they will be quarantined against infecting politics.[4] Fuller sees a public sphere sufficiently robust to allow its citizens to deliberate with all the pluralistic epistemic resources as their disposal. It is hardly surprising then that Fuller sides with Feyerabend and the “teach the controversies” model currently advanced by the Intelligent Design movement when it comes to the issue of how best to present Darwinism, or science in general, in the public schools.[5] For some people, particularly academics who think they are for diversity, this prospect will be deeply unsettling—and properly so. As Marx might have put it (Fuller is always channeling dead philosophers to clarify where they stand on the issues he raises) “Precisely so, that is exactly what we intend!”

The radically revisionist character of Fuller’s themes makes his book an intellectual adventure to read. Beneath the formal symmetry and narrative allure of his catchy chapter titles is a sumptuously endowed and richly nuanced intellectual history of the contemporary philosophy of science. Fuller offers a perspective on familiar themes that is alternative both to neo-positivism and to post-modernism yet which is clearly enriched by the better insights of each. In a sense, and despite its manifest philosophic and sociological heft, Fuller’s book is a sustained meditation on historiography. Yet this is not quite the right term. I would rather call his theme by a term of my own invention—rhetoriography—and define it as the application of rhetorical methods to the study of historical objects, agents, movements, arguments, ideas, or “ideographs.”[6] While rhetoriography holds much in common with historiography, certainly in Fuller’s hands, it is distinguished by its persistent emphasis on problems of communication, politics, community, persuasion, audience, and message reception.

A good example of Fuller’s ability to give a rhetorical twist to traditional philosophic themes is his reconfiguration of the celebrated “discovery/justification” problem in “From Plato to NATO,” which he finds central to the Kuhnian tension between “normal” and “revolutionary” science. With his keen socio-historical eye Fuller starts in the 1830s with William Whewell, polymathic master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who invented the term “scientist.” Fuller tells a story of how Whewell sought to make the university integral to the industrial age by giving it a patent on “theory.” Thus, whatever technological novelties with scientific import clever mechanics might come up with, Whewell made sure only properly trained university philosophers could formulate their underlying principles, translate the principles into theories, and determine if and when the theories were justified. Whewell’s move modified the Baconian heritage by abstracting knowledge from its context of production, putting it in the hands of knowledge experts and thus into a region of pure thought. The Whewellian heritage continues in Kuhn, Fuller contends, in the idea of a paradigm that all scientists in a particular field share as a condition of their certification as scientists. Consider this remarkable run of pure rhetoriography in his account of how writers in the philosophy of science use classical rhetorical topics to perpetually and persuasively reproduce the myth of a unitary trans-historical scientific reason.

One reason Plato is not normally seen as a theorist of the historical method is that he would have regarded most historians as taking their own mythical constructions too much at face value—that is, unreflexively—as if they had come to forget their origins in the pacification of potentially unruly audiences. Thus, historians have tended to stress narrative time to the near exclusion of real time—what a classical rhetorician might call a very high mythos-to-kairos ratio. In other words, a higher premium is placed on the internal logic of events recounted in the historical narrative (mythos) than on why the sequence transpired at the pace and over the length of real time that it did (kairos). (93)

Opposite the philosophic historians Fuller positions the social historians of science, who “stress the exigent character of what scientists do, their need to construct opportune responses to situations that are largely not of their own creation” (93). By the time Fuller is finished with his theme of how exigencies external to science are made to appear part of an esoteric logic internal to it, the issues among the philosophers, philosophic historians, and social historians have returned us to Protagoras and a Fullerian reversal of the received demarcation of form and content. “Given . . . slight changes in context, the weaker argument may have been, indeed, the stronger. In short, those who control when a decision is made control what decision is made” (95). His distinctions between mythos vs. kairos, weaker vs. stronger firmly in place and already creatively deployed, Fuller then uses these topical oppositions to sharply focus his vision of history as an enduring inventional resource. In Fuller’s reading scientific roads not taken are not to be cancelled by paradigms or further marginalized by Kuhn’s maximally minimized “revolutions,” which in his view are but the substitution of one Whewellian elite-certified intellectual straightjacket for another. For Fuller and the sophists, history remains open—ruling paradigms be damned. Versions of science not actualized are to be carried forward via a robust cultivation of memory (I’d call it the Strong Kairos Programme)—as topical resources. The history of science is a history of occasions in which the idea of “progress,” as seen in conventional Whig or textbook histories of science, must now prepare for and compete with the potentially imminent return of the repressed. Not least of rhetorical interest is Fuller’s view of how the epistemic establishments of the day keep the repressed repressed through the doctrine of “double truth,” which he traces in an unbroken line of democratically apostate succession from Plato to Kuhn. Fuller notes that the public display of critical reason marked the key point at which Plato presented Socrates as turning away from the polis. The high-culture implication since Plato of this refusal of the few to address the many is that significant cultural documents must be double coded. On the one hand they are to be read as containing a message intelligible to the elite; on the other they are to throw a sop to the many, to, as it were, put them off the scent. Fuller traces the transmission of this tradition in the twentieth century from iconography in art history through Alexander Koyre, who was Kuhn’s mentor in historiography (51-70). In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions the double truth doctrine appears in the elite message that science is not fully rational for it changes fundamentally, and in the message to the unwashed—but science is always governed by a paradigm, which is governed by an internally certified elite, so don’t think there is any place in this process for you or your opinions.

In chapter 2, “The Last Time Scientists Struggled For the Soul of Science” Fuller provides a suitably rhetorical model of a road not taken—which he urges ought to be revisited—in his account of the running battle between Ernst Mach and Max Planck. Not least of interest in this chapter is its educational setting. Here Fuller presents two major figures in the history of physics locked in principled and public disagreement not just over the nature of physics, but also over the civic aims of science education. “Broadly speaking, Mach’s instrumentalism drove him to see mass empowerment and scientific credentialism as incompatible goals for education, whereas Planck’s realism led him to endorse credentialism as a necessary complement to a rapidly expanding educational system” (110). For Mach, Fuller points out, science was to be merely a kind of shorthand, labor saving device, the critical intellectual component of which was to make people more attentive to their own experience in the task of problem solving. For Planck and for the Euclidean model of reason that later became the hallmark for Rudolf Carnap’s logical positivism, geometry, rather than being a helpful labor-saving technique for facilitating thought (in those special fields where it was applicable), became the very paradigm of thought itself. Fuller notes how Mach’s seemingly reactionary or romantic insistence on the integrity of scientific ideas rejected by mainstream science—particularly his relentless rehearsal of unanswered objections to Newton—was credited by Einstein for having placed at his disposal the very resources he needed to development his theory of relativity! Fuller draws from this episode the appropriately rhetoriographic observation. “History can be used not only to legitimate the present and the recover the past, but also to alter the future by reintroducing silenced voices from the past into present-day concerns” (126). Central to the role Mach saw for science education was the empowering of students to solve their own problems with science as a model for what it meant to be an active inquirer rather than a passive recipient of knowledge.

 In the end Mach lost out to Planck. (Ahh, but History is not over!) Fuller recovers from the debate with Planck the social meaning of Mach’s loss. If with Mach science was the search for the most reliable means for adapting the world to human ends then its success would be measured by the ease with which an ordinary person could appropriate its lessons without the mediation of experts. Hence the socially redemptive point in the “value free” emphasis of early positivism—science was not to impose a separate scale of values on the larger culture. If, however, with Planck science is the quest for the most comprehensive view of reality then it easily becomes “the imposition of one special interest group’s view of the world on everyone else” (138, 139).

In chapter 3, “The Politics of the Scientific Image in the Age of Conant,” one sees in the historical and social forces that shaped Kuhn exactly what an elitist view of science and society means for education and why such “education” is a standing threat to democracy. Kuhn’s mentor was James Conant, and though one does not catch a whiff of evangelical fervor for undergraduate education with a social mission in Kuhn’s book, one can’t miss it in Conant. One comes away from Fuller’s chapter with the realization that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for all its seeming remoteness from the undergraduate science-education classroom, is an answer to a rhetorical challenge in the structure of scientific education as seen from the post World War II social and educational perspective of Conant. Conant was a scientific believer par excellence of the Planck—let science alone so it can take care of itself and tell you what is best for you—variety. Conant realized via his tour of German universities in the 1920s that science and government were going to be collaborators and he liked the top-down science he saw in German labs where a lab director divided research into parts carried out by his fresh-minted Ph.D. assistants. Conant’s social mission on his return was to convince future American opinion leaders and managers that science should be publicly funded and also supported by business but otherwise left alone to determine its own destiny, direction, and problems. The public then just needed to learn to leave it alone and to adjust to its demands.

Chapter 4, “From Conant’s Education Strategy to Kuhn’s Research Strategy,” examines how those remarkable rhetorical artifacts—both Kuhn’s first book on the Copernican revolution and his celebrated second book on scientific revolution—address and elide their contentious point of origin. As Fuller sketches it Kuhn rarely mentions and never argues Conant’s educational concerns—though Conant’s introduction to the Copernicus book gives something of their flavor; he just uncritically takes them for granted. In place of the copious political and cold war references in Conant, in Kuhn one finds, Fuller notes, only the occasional political metaphor the most striking of which is “revolution.” Indeed Fuller finds Kuhn as a historian of science conventional for he continues, rather than challenges, the then received view of science as only minimally influenced by the politics of the society around it. Revolutions are the one vulnerable point of social influence Kuhn allows, but he sees them as brief and science as returning quickly to business as usual under the management of the new paradigm. In contrast to Kuhn, Conant had seen science as involving trial and error and multiple viewpoints rather than proceeding according to a single, unitary paradigm. In a witty but telling bon mot Fuller compares a Kuhnian paradigm to a Superego that keeps science pure by holding in check its epistemically libidinous Id.

Chapter 4 contains Fuller’s eye-opening historical/sociological reconstruction of the provenance of the various elements that have gone into the construction of Kuhn’s paradigm-centered view of science. The key passage is this: “the concept is less anachronistic than syncretistic. It has been less a throwback to inquiry’s idyllic past than a superimposition of perspectives from different moments in the history of science. . . . Like the components of all good myths, these layers represent tendencies that have occurred to varying degrees in various fields at various times and places. But they have never all occurred in one place at one time” (195). But, as I have said, citing Fuller is always dangerous. Congratulate oneself for editorial parsimony as one may there is always that further irresistible sentence that gives the lie to any pretence of citational continence. Here it is. “Ironically, this is the feature of myths that has led anthropologists in the past to regard ‘primitive’ peoples as lacking a historical sensibility” (195). From the standpoint of rhetoriography the chapter is a splendid case study in the double truth doctrine. Fuller persuasively argues, citing the man himself, that for Kuhn the future success of science requires an Orwellian historiography. That is, it depends upon the historian’s critical or second order awareness not contaminating the scientist’s work-a-day awareness of the nature of her activity (206).

Studded with rhetorical insight as is each of Fuller’s chapters, chapter 5, “How Kuhn Unwittingly Saved Social Science From A Radical Future,” makes abundantly clear that the most interesting and fundamental persuasive impact of Kuhn was not the result of a brilliant, let alone sinister, rhetorical strategy—in fact it was not even the result of the will of a knowing agent. While some post-modern rhetoricians will be quick to point out this chapter shows how “revolutionary documents” can succeed without reference to “agents,” what the chapter shows is how complex and diverse the idea of rhetorical agency actually is—and how closely tied it is to the rhetorical situation and agency of audiences. Kuhn’s single greatest impact was on social science. Starting in the mid to late sixties social scientists adopted him in mass conversions, one is tempted to say, without precedent even within religious history. It is not for nothing that Fuller early evokes the image of Peter Sellers’ movie Being There to explicate his understanding of Thomas Kuhn (xiii, xiv). Kuhn did not intend to legitimize the social sciences, he didn’t even have much use for them. But what could he say? Did Kuhn let the dogs out? Not intentionally. He was merely found standing by the open kennel door, key in hand. Because Kuhn defined a paradigm as what made a science “scientific”—rather than expensive equipment or some fundamental problem about nature—the social sciences saw Kuhn as the liberator from their physics envy, the redeemer of their hope that one day they too could be recognized as real scientists. Every discipline could accept an appropriate paradigm as its personal savior. Well, everyone congratulated themselves on their scientifically certified redemption, and the hypocrisy of objective reactionaries who think of themselves as radicals (the academic world as we know it today) was upon us. As Fuller puts it “by the 1970’s the rhetoric of the dissenting academy had subtly shifted from claims that the sciences were allowing the military-industrial complex to colonize the university to claims that one’s own field had the right to pursue its paradigm alongside the natural sciences” (244). Or even more strongly, “[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions] would seem to have corrupted all of its left-inspired appropriations” (251). Developing themes from Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology and Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, Fuller offers an incisive thumbnail sketch of the ideological neutering of the German left via Habermas and the popularity of the suggestion among various highly placed, scientistically inebriated minds that “Kuhn’s model of scientific change [was] a kind of evolutionary eschatology that was reminiscent of Marx’s dialectical materialism” (251, 252). When such minds, predisposed to authoritarianism from the start, are given a choice between scientism and democracy the result is no more in doubt than following a lit fuse wondering if there will be an explosion. “Thus, in good Kuhnian fashion, the finalizationists left open the possibility that public problems will be replaced by ‘clarified’ scientific ones, much as a paradigmatic order replaces preparadigmatic confusion.” And who in the meantime was minding the store—in the sense of the public interest and democratic values? “It was only once finalization attracted such technocratic interest [from technocrats in the Social Democratic administration trained in engineering, or Chancellor Schmidt, an economist] that public opposition began, mostly from humanists and other protectors of academic freedom in the face of expanding student enrollments and external research demands” (252, 253). Central to the importance of this book, and indeed to the cascade of books that Fuller, in rapid succession, has authored, is the wake-up call he is trying to send to intellectuals who think of science as their friend and somehow the liberator of humanity—as though the enemy were still religion! “If science were portrayed as not only the engine of world history but also an institution with overarching ends of its own, then that could be (and has been) taken to mean that the ends of science must take precedence over—if not simply overtake—the ends of humanity. We would therefore not be far from the Platonic vision of scientists as philosopher-kings who clarify their own vision in order to superimpose it on everyone else” (259). What an irony that a message never intended to have the catatonically catalyzing affect it has had on the social sciences and (one might say) the former humanities has been so well received, while a message that diagnoses the problem and exposes the sham has yet to make its mark as a metanoia of western thought. But for the rhetoriographer history is not over and, kairotically speaking, is ever young. In any event Fuller aptly characterizes Kuhn’s not as a “master narrative” but as a “servant narrative”—a narrative that serves the interests of what is.

Chapter 6, “The World Not Well Lost: Philosophy After Kuhn,” spells out what has been lost when “thought” becomes virtually coincident with Big Science (including government and business) and its in-house cadre of audience pacification experts, the professional philosophers. Early in the chapter Fuller raises the question of how the positivists, who never really mastered any science but physics, became so influential in defining the public image of the methods of science. He advances his own view that the positivists never intended to be “underlaborers” for science—an image introduced by John Locke—but wished to use science “to promote certain philosophic ends of larger societal import.” The cultural aim of the positivists in Fuller’s reading was, “extending to all spheres of life the critical attitude that motivated scientists to challenge traditional beliefs in the first place” (262). The chapter can be seen as a lengthy exposition of the thesis, “As science comes to be materially committed to particular lines of inquiry, such that the costs of reversing them becomes prohibitive, the spirit of criticism is increasingly difficult to sustain” (262). Fuller chronicles in case after case how contemporary philosophers of science have given up all pretence of holding an independently critical standpoint on science and have essentially played (in the case of philosophers of biology such as Michael Ruse and Phillip Kitcher—with gusto!) the role that Whewell designed for them in the nineteenth century. They are state paid administrators of a new secular natural theology pure and simple (264).

If Fuller’s theses are broad and sweeping his mastery of detail is thorough and persuasive. Particularly convincing is Fuller’s rendition of what happened to “naturalism” in philosophy from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. As Fuller shows, early representatives of “naturalism” from William James to C. I. Lewis to John Dewey wished to see science serve larger human ends and ultimately evaluated the rationality of science in relation to those ends. All of them avoided merely ceding reason to science, that is equating reason with whatever science does, leaving philosophy with the underlaboring task of merely describing science’s method(s) and reducing them to a set of logically consistent principles. It is not that Fuller is against formal logic; in his account of C. I. Lewis he underscores and seconds Lewis’s concern to use formal logic to clarify humanly meaningful choices—not just to endorse whatever follows validly from scientific premises. Consistent with his own view of history as continuing in the present the topical resources of a rich and complex past, Fuller examines important principles in James, Lewis, and Dewey that later “naturalists” in philosophy have ignored. Fuller’s care to recover important philosophic distinctions about the functions and senses of “reason” make the chapter difficult to summarize but important, if even in barest outline, to understand.

The pivot of his chapter is his explication of how in Kuhn two distinct meanings of reason came together and the possibility of a philosophy capable of critiquing science was lost in their merger. Fuller explains how in the eighteenth century reason meant combating superstition and tradition, that is, religion. In the nineteenth century reason came to be a “governing principle, one that regulates the growth of knowledge by directing and measuring the path of inquiry” (291). The aim of the eighteenth-century version of reason was to achieve a universally valid understanding of reality; the nineteenth-century, positivistic, version sought secure foundations. Kuhn seems to have finessed these two views in that while a “paradigm” or “normal science” is a tradition it is a tradition that does not just preserve the past in the present but exhibits cumulative growth. Thus the domains in which a paradigm solves puzzles are new though many of its practices may be “traditional.” But in the Kuhnian combination or conflation of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophic emphases, reason in the sense of critique, including self-critique, is essentially lost. In one of the many images from economics that punctuate his book Fuller compares the eighteenth-century rationalist to the entrepreneur who breaks up cottage industry and whose enemy is sub-optimal producers. The nineteenth-century rule-based thinkers, the positivists, he compares to manufacturers who out produce all competitors—and whose enemy is the Luddite who irrationally destroys resources and equipment. As Fuller aptly sums it up, a Kuhnian economist is a “friend of the manufacturer but an enemy of the entrepreneur” (294). In his following section on “How We All Became Accountants,” Fuller advances the view that twentieth-century philosophy of science has produced “an account of science that fails to recognize a place for rational criticism outside the existing epistemic power structure” (294). A particularly telling moment in Fuller’s indictment is his observation that the fate of a Kuhnian paradigm is decided not by its defenders and opponents but by the “Planck effect”—which side in the long run out-produces the other in disciples and research. In the section “Revolutions Rendered Both Invisible and Irrational,” Fuller explains how the Planck effect removes the process of paradigm shift from public scrutiny and makes the resulting “shift” something that cannot be considered a rational, conscious choice. Returning to his rhetoriographically pregnant theme of time, Fuller points out how Kuhn has an essentially “romantic” view of the relation between tradition and innovation—that is, he sees the difference as absolute, thus leaving out of his account the classical view of, say, a constitutional lawyer who sees tradition and innovation as a matter of degree or, one might add, of a neo-classical rhetorician, moral philosopher, or casuist. In his final section, “The Road Not Taken: Toulmin’s Route from Philosophy to Rhetoric,” Fuller charts what followers of Toulmin have long recognized—and post-moderns have yet to understand—that the tradition of practical reason is an alternative to the false choice between Cartesian “rationality” and “everyone for herself.” Fuller explains how, unlike Kuhn and unlike the positivists, Toulmin refused to draw any sharp line between reasoning about empirical and normative matters, that he pulled the distinction up by its Humean roots and replaced it with the view that the difference is formal, not substantive, is “field dependent,” and can be drawn only in particular contexts (312). Communication scholars who have seen the rhetorical tradition as an agonistically renewable resource rather than a toxic burden to be dumped, will be particularly gratified by Fuller’s emphasis on the importance of Toulmin’s view of practical reason, its absence in contemporary science studies, and the way in which the weakness he sees in Toulmin—his lack of an adequate view of ethos—is complemented by Kenneth Burke’s emphasis on this very point (313, 314).

In the remaining two chapters of the book, chapter 7, “Kuhnification as Ritualized Political Impotence: The Hidden History of Science Studies,” and 8, “Conclusion,” Fuller creatively uses his critique of Kuhn to reframe the agenda of science studies. “I wish to recover what lies outside these Khunified horizons of critical science studies. This is the tricky proposition to which my project of social epistemology has been devoted for the past ten years” (317). Both of these chapters could stand alone—chapter 7 for the social-intellectual history it provides of the fate of science studies in Britain, America, and France since the late 1960s (his account of the French social context in the development of “actor network theory” is particularly insightful) and chapter 8 for Fuller’s final judgment of Kuhn and his proposal for a way beyond our current Kuhnian impasse. The message of these chapters, strong as is each on its own, is all the stronger for their positioning, as I have remarked already, in the narrative that precedes them. The content of these chapters, particularly 7, underscores the urgency of Fuller’s call, via the sophists and Mach, to seize roads not taken, opportunities overlooked, and to correct the relativist aporia of the present. As in philosophy, so in sociology, Fuller underscores how distinguished members of an earlier generation urged critique where a later generation has been satisfied with respectability. In sociology Fuller points out how Mannheim and C. Wright Mills were skeptical of science’s self-representations. In America even that notorious leftist Dwight David Eisenhower had warned of the “military-industrial complex,” and yet in the end in America, Britain, and Europe something like “respect my paradigm and I’ll shut up about critique and meaning” conquered all. Perhaps the most interesting irony of chapter 7 is Fuller’s point that the original impulse for study of the social dimension of science came not from social scientists lusting after new virgin territory but from natural scientists interested in bringing to professional science training the skills necessary for citizenship traditionally associated with the liberal arts curriculum.

Fuller’s conclusion is an apt summation and extension of his entire argument. Unsurprisingly Fuller finds that the overall effect of Structure has been to divert the trends that in the early ‘60s, coming both from the academy and the larger society, were favorable toward a critique of Big Science. Conant would have approved, Fuller notes, the social conservatism of his mentees’ book though not its resultant tendency to further subdivide academic labor. An already fragmenting academy, Fuller argues, accounts for Kuhn’s having been appropriated by “a broad church ranging from ‘normal scientists’ to self-avowed ‘postmodernists’” (380). Fortunately this unfortunate trajectory of appropriation supplied the historical motive for Fuller’s book. “The point of my book has been to explore the background social, philosophical, and historical conditions that have allowed this strange turn of events, in the hope that we may still be in a position to remedy whatever damage has been caused by an unreflective acceptance of the account of science given in Structure” (380).

The unreflective acceptance of Kuhn, particularly by the social sciences, was but the consequence of a work that in Fuller’s view was unreflective all the way down. Fuller writes that,

 . . . my account has attributed Kuhn’s significance largely to things that other people thought and did. As we have seen, this extends beyond the reception of Structure to its actual composition. This pronounced state of uninvolvement suggests that he did indeed suffer from a state of diminished cultural responsibility that makes the sense of “being there” I raised in the preface more than just a nasty dig. In any case, we need a term for the incapacity to do what is expected of someone in a given social position, a failure to acknowledge from where one had come to where and was supposed to go. Let us call this condition culturopathy. Culturopaths lack reflexive engagement with what they say and do. . . . If Kuhn was indeed a culturopath, then the challenge for his admirers will be to disentangle whatever insight they have derived from Structure from any attributions of intentionality to its author. . . . Structure is an ironically self-exemplifying text: a work that grounded science’s success in paradigmatic pursuits that was itself the creation of a mind-set that could not see beyond the paradigms under which it labored. (397-399)

Fuller follows this negative assessment of Kuhn with his positive proposal, “The Secularization of Paradigms as Movements.” If, as Fuller has argued, Whewell began the process by which academic philosophers became an entrenched academic clerisy, removed from the public yet authorized to act as certifiers of true science, then what Big Science needs is what religion has already undergone—disestablishment or secularization. If I read him correctly Fuller proposes a political solution to an enterprise of critique that philosophy has failed to achieve, indeed has effectively betrayed. It is not that Fuller abandons philosophy for politics, but that he shows how philosophy and sociology must become political in the right sense if separately or together they are to fulfill their mission of critique. Fuller would have philosophy return to an agonistically based Popperian model of science in the spirit of Conjectures and Refutations. What he has in mind is not simply a philosopher who favors a particular model of science advocating its knowledge claims and rebutting those of other models—though philosophy’s contribution would be an important moment in this process. “The desired metatheory would justify the participation of the entire society in the process of mutual criticism rather than just a self-selected community of experts” (401). Given that decisions about science policy are already decisions involving vast amounts of public monies, concern public health, and involve, in no small way, matters of national defense, public values, and the nature of education, indeed of the state itself, the broader culture already has an interest in them and their political character should be made explicit. The alternative, supported by all the usual Platonistic reasons, is that elite science should guide, that is decide these matters for us by experts operating off stage and out of sight. If, on the other hand, one might wonder how “objectivity” would be preserved by politicizing science, Fuller has a response. “Instead of first tampering with people’s biases as they are trained to be ‘objective’ in their personal assessment of each other’s knowledge claims, I believe that ‘objectivity’ should be a continuously emergent property of the interaction of proponents and opponents of knowledge claims” (401). (The shades of Protagoras, Isocrates, Mach, William Jennings Bryan, Popper, and Feyerabend stand in ovation from the beyond of the repressed.)

If one might begin to suspect that Fuller’s proposal looks like academic populism, a sell out of the clerks to the great unwashed, Fuller, as always, has a response. Might not the sell out be just the reverse? Drawing on the work of the American sociologist Robert Wuthnow, Fuller argues that there were three epochs of European history when debates among intellectuals had a major impact on, indeed set the agenda for, the larger society—the reformation, the enlightenment, and the various socialist movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Again, if I properly understand him, it is to reverse the current burgeoning trend of science away from democracy and toward elitism and to create a robust public role for intellectuals in a democratic society that Fuller wants to politicize in the right way (it is already politicized in the wrong way) scientific models and science policy. Hence the gravamen of the book: “I urge that we turn Kuhn on his head and demonstrate that a paradigm is nothing more than an arrested social movement” (402). Again drawing on Wuthnow, Fuller notes that sectarian withdrawal under the cover of purity, coupled with refusal to talk to one’s opponents or to acknowledge any existing authority as legitimate (one thinks of “Fifth Monarchy” men in the English Civil War) is the kind of divisiveness that diminished the impact of these earlier movements. The spirit of sectarian withdrawal and refusal to discuss with opponents certainly characterizes all but a heroic minority of contemporary defenders of Darwinism (one thinks of Will Proven) and is a prime example for Fuller of why one would be warranted in thinking of consensus-based normal science as a strategic retreat from the spirit of inquiry especially if “inquiry” is conceived in the Popperian sense of a sustained willingness to challenge the status quo and to entertain opposing arguments: “permanent revolution,” as he put it in a bit of anti-Kuhnian pique. In that case, what Kuhn regarded as a mark of collective self-discipline on the part of the founders of the Royal Society to exclude politics, religion, and morals from their purview would come to be seen as an institutionalized failure of nerve. And this is precisely the image that I wish to promote. (407-408)

Concluding Epideictic Postscript

It would require a reviewer with competencies other than my own to place Fuller with technical precision in a philosophic school. Clearly the social vision of Popper’s critical rationalism seems to be a generative element in his thought as well as a certain marked sympathy for William James’s pragmatism laced in with a stiff, if always critical, mixture of Marxian and otherwise sociological critique, and a tincture of Lacanian psychoanalysis. My own suspicion is that Fuller, at bottom, is an exceptionally skilled rhetorician, thoroughly informed philosophically, as Plato was, except politically allied with democratic culture. Not least of the merits and instructive value of his book is his analytic use of philosophic distinctions to correct projects that he would have succeed but that he believes have gone wrong. His carefully logical analysis in chapter 7 on how the opposite of contingency is necessity rather than universality, offered as a corrective for what he sees as the bad writing and self-defeating relativist thinking of STS scholarship, is but one of many cases in point (358-363). His running commentary on Kant, Hegel, and Marx, on Comte, Weber, and Mills, which quickly lead to comments on Bell, Bloor, Fukuyama, Schumpeter, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Lacan, is always informative, insightful, and, if philosophy can be, entertaining. Indeed Thomas Kuhn is not one book, none of Fuller’s is, but several. His copious footnotes, dense, swirling, and remorseless as the tide, constantly break against the narrowing headlands of his text, in some pages seeming dangerously to undercut it. Should his textual shoreline ever collapse, I am confident it will reappear somewhere else, refigured, or else, as a surprising gift, be cast forward in the coming surge that will surely be his next book (which he has probably finished in the time it has taken me to read and review this one). Fuller is at once a philosopher and a rhetorician. He is a philosopher because he is animated by ideas—particularly by a vision of how science can contribute to democracy and how democracy can reshape and humanize science. He is a rhetorician because he is not controlled by philosophy but uses it as an instrument of institutional critique, political reconstruction, and cultural renewal. Fuller’s philosophy is thus kairotic; it is a philosophy appropriate to our historical moment and hopefully will energize its readers to make the most of it. And when, as I hope it will, the shock of his message settles in and those who might be intellectual leaders of an open and truly pluralistic society respond and creatively appropriate it, I think he will tell us something new, something we did not suspect and from a perspective we did not anticipate.

John Angus Campbell is professor and chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis.