Philosopher Reginald Williams uses Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to flog COVID-19 research and policy as being stifled by authoritarian politics suppressing all but the establishment view (“Thomas Kuhn and COVID-19,” FI, October/November 2020).
Kuhn’s book was a wildfire hit among nonscientists. Among scientists, not so much. The failings in Kuhn’s understanding of science have been spelled out incisively and eloquently in Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg’s brief, brilliant essay “The Revolution That Didn’t Happen.” It’s readily available on the internet, and because it is much better than anything I can say, I recommend this essay to all who wish to understand both the hoopla surrounding Kuhn’s book and its grave shortcomings.
The other book that is highly relevant here—and that might help nonscientist readers understand how paradigm shifts occur in science—is Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek’s extraordinary book Longing for the Harmonies, the best book I know explaining physics to nonscientists. He spends a chapter on the “radical conservatism” of science. The hard sciences stubbornly try their utmost to explain every new phenomenon with the current paradigm. That is their conservatism.
Why? Because the theory underlying the current paradigm is the most powerful at explaining everything we know how to explain. So if every time a new phenomenon is observed you pop out a new paradigm to explain it that can’t explain anything else, it is useless. Oversimplifying: fifty theories to explain fifty facts is a useless tautology; one theory to explain fifty facts is a powerful theory.
Not until we are certain that there are no errors in our observations of new phenomena, and equally certain that there is no known way to make the present paradigm predict them correctly, do scientists start groping for how to broaden the present paradigm. That is when the science breaks radically from its previous conservatism to look for a new paradigm. But there is a powerful constraint on any proposed new paradigm: it must not only predict all the new phenomena correctly, it must also correctly predict all the old phenomena that the old paradigm predicted correctly.
Why? Because science operates on a fundamental presupposition—wildly empirically successful so far—that there is an underlying unity to the laws of nature. Thus, science has a goal, an ultimate ideal: to discover the universal paradigm that can correctly explain and predict all observable phenomena. Of course, as the great Nobel laureate biologist J. B. S. Haldane remarked, not only is nature queerer than we suppose, it may be queerer than we can suppose. So the limits of the human mind may make the ideal forever unattainable. But so far, we are going gangbusters and should proceed apace.
Kuhn did not understand this radical conservatism of science and the constraint on paradigm shifts and what drives them (they are not a fashion statement) or even that science has a goal. In Weinberg’s words, Kuhn made the shift from one paradigm to another seem more like a religious conversion than an exercise of reason. Kuhn argued that scientific theories are important social constructions, not so different from democracy or baseball. And it is just such conclusions, music to their ears, that have made Kuhn such a hit with the philosophers, historians, sociologists, and cultural critics who actually must deal with social constructions, who are unjustly starved of grants and feel put down by the privileged objective character of scientific knowledge. See, they say, Kuhn shows that science is no more objective and privileged than our stuff.
The only problem is that Kuhn is wrong.
Williams complains that the theory of infectious disease is all ifs, ands, maybes, non-quantifiables, and non-falsifiables. And it is true that much of the theory is qualitative rather than quantitative about details of each infectious vector, particularly new ones such as COVID-19. But the qualitative theory has been strikingly successful. Public-health strategies applying the theory are more engineering than science. There are different ways to engineer a desired product from a given theory, but public-health protocols using the best science available have quelled horrible epidemics. And they do have a very quantifiable test: death and disability rates per capita for comparable populations. The scorecard is widely available on the internet.
So far, theory and observation jibe; therefore, no new paradigm is called for. Empirically, the Fauci-type establishment protocols, when promptly and strongly initiated and competently done, appear to be beating all others hands down. Countries invaded by COVID-19 that use these strategies conscientiously have far fewer deaths and hospitalizations. Similar countries that don’t, have high rates.
Sweden tried a plausible non-establishment approach—a deliberate “herd strategy”: leave everything as is, let people catch COVID-19, and eventually everyone will be immune. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Sweden’s COVID-19 deaths were way above the low rates in their Nordic neighbors, who seriously followed the establishment protocols (and also had very cooperative, civic-minded populations). Neither does its economy seem any better off. (Part of Sweden’s difficulty is we have since learned that immunity from getting COVID-19 itself is much weaker than from the vaccine, which is why vaccination is now recommended even if one has had the virus.)
On the other hand, the United States and England, both of which were incompetently laggard and cavalierly lax, had among the worst rates in the developed world. And here in the United States, the protocols were belittled and politically weaponized as an assault on liberty. We have paid dearly.
This does not mean that people who propose different public-health strategies to apply the science shouldn’t be heard. Williams is correct to complain if people are being silenced. But they have to first come up with a credible case for why a different approach would work better than the very successful current establishment protocols, which have been honed over decades of different epidemics. There is a reason, after all, why Sweden’s maverick approach did not work out so well.