• DOI:10.1177/106591297703000102
• Corpus ID: 144412975

Reading Thomas Kuhn in the Post-Behavioral Era

@article{Ricci1977ReadingTK,
  title={Reading Thomas Kuhn in the Post-Behavioral Era},
  author={David M. Ricci},
  journal={Political Research Quarterly},
  year={1977},
  volume={30},
  pages={34 - 7}
}

• David M. Ricci
• Published 1 March 1977
• Education
• Political Research Quarterly

(1962)1 is the second most frequently used book in political science courses on scope and methods.2 This ranking reflects two realities. For one thing, it shows that even a decade after Kuhn's work appeared, many political scientists still regard it as having something important to say about what we are doing professionally. In this sense, we share with many other students of society a feeling that the Kuhnian idea of science is an extraordinarily fruitful notion.3 At the same time, the fact that we persist in reading Kuhn's book indicates that we do not agree on exactly what it is he teaches us. The other best-sellers on scope and methods are mainly textbooks that summarize and categorize a great many concepts and techniques,4 and Kuhn's volume therefore stands out as the only important primary source among them. Were there some single truth we agreed to extract from Kuhn once and for all, it would already have been reduced to manageable proportions, to be inserted into standard textbooks while the original was relegated to a footnote. Instead, we continue to pore over the primary source, and our protracted uncertainty about what Kuhn means for the political science discipline is expressed in professional writings that draw a number of interesting but sometimes contradictory inferences from his work.5 So we read Kuhn assiduously but do not agree on what he has to say, and as a discipline we are interested in his theory but also confused by it. All of this means that on the subject of Kuhn there is still room for discussion. Accordingly, I shall in this essay suggest a somewhat new way of reading Kuhn's book in relation to the study of politics. To say that my approach to Kuhn is only "somewhat" new is to acknowledge that I have learned a great deal from others who have already incorporated their interpretations of his work into discussions about the nature of political inquiry. But I would go further and place some of these earlier commentaries on Kuhn in a comprehensive new framework of understanding. This will touch, among other things, upon some of Karl Popper's ideas about science and society, some writings of behavioralists concerning the scientific method and what to expect from it, the central current of democratic thought in America after World War II, some general problems of behavioral work in political science, and some speculation about a stance we might take toward behavioralism today.