The Structure Thirty Years Later: Refashioning a Constructivist Metaphysical Program Sergio Sismondo Cornell University 1. Introduction I argue here that for the past thirty years there has been a persistent misreading of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.1 Not everybody has partici- pated in this misreading, but its persistence is remarkable. So one of my tasks is to diagnose the reasons for its continuance. It is also an important misreading, because it attributes to Kuhn a view that is from most people's perspective highly untenable, that scientists in some strong sense construct the world by choosing a paradigm. To avoid repeating work done by Gutting and many others (see Gutting 1980) 1 will focus on Kuhn's constructivist metaphysical program, as seen by commentators. I am interested in the relationship between paradigms and their ontologies, not in the rationality of science, its progressiveness, etc. As such, I will leave aside questions about incommensurability, about the dynamics of theory change, about the constitu- tion of scientific communities, and other contentious issues stemming from Struicture. And I use 'paradigm' in a loose way, to mean something like the "disciplinary ma- trix" that Kuhn describes in "Second Thoughts on Paradigms" (Kuhn 1974). 2. Idealist readings of Kuhn The view that I think Kuhn does not hold, but which he is sometimes thought to hold, is that scientists, in adopting a paradigm, construct a world (in addition to the so- cial and conceptual world in which they live) in which the basic tenets of the paradigm hold true. Readings of Structure that include this create an "idealist" or "Neo- Kantian" Kuhn; an early such reading was given by Israel Scheffler, who called Kuhn "an extravagant idealist" (1967). These readings of Kuhn's ontological program stem mostly from fairly literal interpretations of Kuhn's talk of different worlds existing be- fore and after a revolution. The scientists in the changed discipline are taken to be not merely seeing the world differently, but living in a different world: When the "sugges- tion [that Herschel's new comet was a planet] was accepted, there were several fewer stars and one more planet in the world of the professional astronomer" (1970a, p. 115). For Carl Kordig, for example, it is this sentence and ones like it which lead him to the conclusion that Kuhn is an idealist, and therefore a relativist. PSA 1992, Volume 1, pp. 300-312 Copyright ? 1992 by the Philosophy of Science Association This content downloaded from 76.64.22.220 on Fri, 14 Feb 2025 19:57:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms