Remerciez-le!

Remerciez @Admin pour avoir partagé cet document gratuitement, de la manière la plus simple, en partageant sur les réseaux sociaux.

Linguistic Society of America The Applicability of Kuhn's Paradigms to the Hist

Linguistic Society of America The Applicability of Kuhn's Paradigms to the History of Linguistics Author(s): W. Keith Percival Source: Language, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Jun., 1976), pp. 285-294 Published by: Linguistic Society of America Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/412560 Accessed: 31-03-2019 15:56 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Linguistic Society of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Sun, 31 Mar 2019 15:56:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE APPLICABILITY OF KUHN'S PARADIGMS TO THE HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS W. KEITH PERCIVAL University of Kansas This paper examines the applicability to the history of linguistics of Thomas Kuhn's conception of the history of science. It concludes that his notion of REVOLUTION, borrowed from the history of the non-sciences, can be applied to the history of linguistics; but the same is not true of his other key notion, the PARADIGM. The possession of paradigms, according to Kuhn, is what distinguishes the hard sciences from fields in the humanities and social sciences which have not achieved scientific maturity. Kuhn regards a paradigm as (1) resulting from an outstanding scientific achievement on the part of a single innovator, and (2) commanding uniform assent among all the members of the discipline. If these two requirements are to be every- where met, the concept cannot be applied either to the history or the present state of linguistics. Serious objections can also be raised to other features of Kuhn's theory, such as the view that shifting allegiance from one paradigm to another is a largely irrational process. The paper recommends, then, that linguists abandon the theory. This paper examines how Thomas Kuhn's conception of the history of science has been applied to the history of linguistics. Specifically, it poses two questions: (1) Has Kuhn's theory been correctly applied to the history of linguistics? and (2) Is the theory intrinsically applicable to the history of linguistics ? For readers who may not be fully acquainted with Kuhn's ideas, I preface my discussion with a summary of them. I close with a few general comments about the adequacy of Kuhn's conception as a tool in intellectual historiography. When Kuhn's monograph The structure of scientific revolutions was first published in 1962, as a volume in the International encyclopedia of unified science, it was immediately widely acclaimed and widely criticized. Particularly incisive criticism was leveled, e.g., by Shapere 1964. Kuhn responded to his critics by clarifying and developing his position in subsequent publications. In 1970 he published a revised edition of the book, enlarged by the addition of a 36-page postscript. Some appre- ciation of the storm of controversy which Kuhn's ideas have aroused among philosophers of science may be gained by perusing the proceedings of the 1965 International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science (Lakatos & Musgrave 1970)-which was devoted to a discussion of the theory, and at which Kuhn attempted to answer his critics (1970b). The revised version of the theory has been subjected to trenchant criticism by Shapere 1971. Two theses are basic to Kuhn's theory: one about the nature of science, and the other about how scientific disciplines develop. As for the first, Kuhn holds that science cannot be identified with the particular collection of facts, theories, and methods exhibited in current textbooks. Hence the history of science is not the story of how this fund of knowledge and expertise was acquired. It also follows that out-of-date theories are no less scientific than those current today: all one can say is that the canons of scientific theory and practice vary from period to period. In other words, Kuhn proposes to relativize the notion of science. As regards the way scientific disciplines develop, Kuhn's second basic thesis is 285 This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Sun, 31 Mar 2019 15:56:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms LANGUAGE, VOLUME 52, NUMBER 2 (1976) that they do not develop by gradual accretion of discoveries. Science is not, as has been widely supposed,1 a cumulative enterprise in which more and more successfu generalizations are achieved on the basis of more and more successful measure- ments and calculations. The historian of science, therefore, cannot hope to characterize the history of a scientific discipline by merely identifying the respective contributions of various practitioners in the past to our present-day stock of knowledge and chronicling the step-by-step process of fresh observation and inductive reasoning based thereon. Kuhn pictures things in a different way: if the progress of a scientific field is plotted on a graph, then the line of development, as he sees it, will show not only smooth upward curves, but also periodic quantum leaps. The quantum leaps are SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS, and the smooth portions of the curve are NORMAL SCIENCE. However, Kuhn views a scientific revolution not just as a break in the con- tinuity of a particular scientific tradition, but (more importantly) as an event brought about by the striking achievement of a SINGLE scientific genius. His favorite examples of scientific revolutions are the theoretical upheavals associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier, and Einstein. The role of the lone innovator is essential to Kuhn's conception of a scientific revolution. As for the periods in between the quantum leaps, Kuhn contends that each period of normal science in the development of a scientific discipline corresponds to one and only one conceptual and methodological framework or PARADIGM. In a nutshell, paradigms are 'universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners' (viii).2 They are, at one and the same time, concrete scientific practice as well as the law, theory, application, and instrumentation cohering with it. (Kuhn now prefers to call these 'disciplinary matrices', but I shall retain the more familiar term 'paradigm' here.) In the 1970 version of Kuhn's theory, a paradigm is said to have four compo- nents: symbolic generalizations, models, values, and exemplars. SYMBOLIC GENERAL- IZATIONS are expressions which can readily be cast in logical form, such asf = ma, Newton's second law of motion. Such formulas are used by adherents of a paradigm in order to apply 'the powerful techniques of logical amd mathematical manipula- tion in their puzzle-solving enterprise' (183). MODELS are conceptual analogies which provide the members of a discipline with an ontological framework, e.g. the notion that 'the molecules of a gas behave like tiny elastic billiard balls in random motion' (184). VALUES are the criteria used by the adherents of a paradigm to judge between competing theories, identify recalcitrant problems, and justify the particular way they conduct research. Finally, EXEMPLARS are 'the concrete problem- solutions that students encounter from the start of their scientific education, whether in laboratories, on examinations, or at the ends of chapters in science 1 On the notion of science as a cumulative enterprise, see Suppe (1974b:6-56). Reichenbach 1951 may be considered a typical representative of this approach. For linguistics viewed in this way, see Bloomfield 1946. This concept has been criticized by Hanson 1958, by Shapere 1966, and by Suppe (1974b:57-118), among others. 2 Page references are normally Kuhn 1970a. On the many meanings of the word 'paradigm' in the earlier version of the theory, see Masterman 1970. 286 This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Sun, 31 Mar 2019 15:56:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms KUHN'S PARADIGMS TO THE HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS texts' (187). They are what Kuhn originally had in mind when h 'paradigm' to refer to what he now calls 'disciplinary matrices'.3 Paradigms are related to revolutions in the following way: e revolution corresponds to a paradigm, and vice versa. Thus a rev determines the character of the paradigm which is adopted in it two concepts are, in fact, defined in terms of each other: 'Scient explains Kuhn, 'are here taken to be those non-cumulative develo in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an in one' (92). However, there is an important difference between th revolutions are precipitated by SINGLE individuals, paradigms are SO ena, namely belief systems shared by all the practitioners of a scien In fact, Kuhn requires uniform assent on the part of the members community as a necessary defining attribute of any genuine paradi He observes, however, that this uniformity of belief is not achiev When a paradigm makes its first appearance in a period of revol it is invariably resisted by the specialists on whose domain it hostility is understandable, since any new paradigm necessarily inv change in the rules governing the practice of normal science. deeper reason for this conflict: in his view, paradigms commit thei complete perceptual set together with uploads/Science et Technologie/ 2-paradigmas-de-kuhn-en-linguistica-pdf.pdf