Thomas Kuhn (1922 to 1996), an American physicist who became a historian and philosopher of science, set out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) that science does not grow by steadily piling up facts. Long stretches of ‘normal science’ work inside a shared paradigm, a model of what the world is like and how to study it, until anomalies build into a crisis and a revolution replaces the old paradigm with a new one. His point that a paradigm can make some things almost invisible sits close to the shamanic teaching that a fixed default position distorts what we are able to perceive.
Who was Thomas Kuhn? #
He was born on 18 July 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and studied physics at Harvard, graduating in 1943 and taking his doctorate in 1949. He moved into the history of science, teaching at Harvard and then at Berkeley from 1956, Princeton from 1964 and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1983.1 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions came out in 1962 and was soon counted among the most influential books of history and philosophy of the twentieth century; its idea of a paradigm shift spread far beyond science, into political science, economics, sociology and business. He died on 17 June 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.2
What is a paradigm? #
A shared example of good science that tells a scientific community what problems are worth solving, how to go about them and what counts as a solution. Working inside a paradigm is what Kuhn called normal science, and most scientists spend their whole careers doing it, solving puzzles the paradigm sets them. It is fascinating and necessary work, but it has a cost. Normal science “seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies”, and what will not fit the box is “often not seen at all”.3
In a postscript of 1969 he sharpened the idea. A paradigm is above all a set of exemplars, worked problems that students learn by doing, and through them they absorb a way of seeing that no list of rules could teach. He borrowed the philosopher Michael Polanyi‘s phrase for it, tacit knowledge, “learned by doing science rather than by acquiring rules for doing it”.4
How does a paradigm change? #
Through anomaly, crisis and revolution. An anomaly is a result the paradigm cannot account for, and it only shows up at all against the background of a precise expectation. In one experiment Kuhn describes, people were shown playing cards for a moment, among them a red six of spades and a black four of hearts, and at first most of them simply saw ordinary cards.5 Scientists treat anomalies the same way for a long time, setting them aside or patching the theory. Kuhn saw a use even in that resistance, since it means a paradigm is not given up too easily, so that the anomalies which do force a change go deep.
When anomalies pile up, confidence drains away and the field enters a crisis. Even then, scientists do not abandon a paradigm because a fact contradicts it. A theory is declared invalid, on Kuhn’s account, only when another is ready to take its place.6 The new paradigm is not simply the old one plus some facts. The two disagree about which problems matter and what words mean, and their followers, in a phrase Kuhn admitted he could not explain further, “practice their trades in different worlds”. Changing paradigm is closer to a conversion than to a proof.7 Afterwards the textbooks are rewritten so that the history looks like a straight line to the present, and so revolutions so often become invisible.8
How does Kuhn’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
At the root. Kuhn, together with critical thinking, symbolic logic included, is one of the roots of Therapeutic Shamanism, and its courses could hardly exist without them. That may seem surprising for a shamanic approach, but it fits: Kuhn is not a philosopher of proof but of how whole disciplines change their minds, and of how a framework can hide what it was never set up to look for.
In practice the closest link is the danger of a default position. The default position of shamans is usually to see spirits as real, and the default position of psychotherapy is usually to see them as disowned and unintegrated parts of the selfParts of the self. There are four parts of the self, the realm-corresponding members of the Inner Tribe: the Body and the middle-world self (both of the middle-world), the Soul (of the Lower-World) and the Spirit (of the Upper-World). The Aware Self, also called the Witness, is not a fifth part but a capacity: the awareness that can watch all four, with compassion and equanimity. Read the full answer. Sometimes the shamans are right and sometimes the psychotherapists are, and the important thing is to try, as far as possible, not to hold a default position that might distort the perception of what is actually there.9 Kuhn shows the same thing happening across whole sciences, where a framework that makes work possible also decides, quietly, what can be seen.
Shamanic practice has its own discipline for this, stalking oneself. Shamanic journeys are not an objective experience but something co-created between us and Spirit, and to experience the realms at all we cannot help but fashion them into something. So shamans bring their own thoughts, preconceptions, belief-systems and biases into awareness, so that they do not unconsciously distort the journey.10 See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
The same pattern shows at the scale of a culture. The usual view of hunter-gatherer life as ‘nasty, brutish and short’ is the dominant cultural narrative we are fed and taught, and in the academic argument over it each side produces evidence for its case and questions the validity of the other side’s evidence.11 Kuhn would recognise that, since rival frameworks disagree not only about the answer but about what counts as evidence. And his point that a paradigm is learnt through exemplars, by doing, matches the teaching that the only way to learn shamanism is by actually doing it.12
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On what lies behind the frameworks. Kuhn wrote about the natural sciences and set limits on his ‘different worlds’. After a revolution the scientist “is still looking at the same world”, and Kuhn denied being a relativist.13 Therapeutic Shamanism goes further in one direction and stays firmer in another. Shamans are clear that the shamanic realms are a world as real as this one, and the more people journey, the more they come to experience that it goes beyond any personal imagination; for any one person, it is found out by journeying, not taken on faith.14 Yet every experience of them is clothed in imagery we bring. That is why the way we frame them matters so much.
On direction. Kuhn described science as progressing without any fixed goal. Shamanism asks of any framework what it grows. There is a saying, ‘be careful what seeds you plant’, and hierarchical thinking “is not good seed”; that is why Core and Therapeutic Shamanism make a deliberate choice to see the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer as a place of love and healing.15
What have critics said about Kuhn? #
His account stands in contrast to that of the philosopher Karl Popper, who held that a single reproducible anomaly can be enough to reject a theory; in Kuhn’s account scientists do not treat anomalies as counter-instances in that way. The two views were discussed at a colloquium in London in 1965, published in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970). Critics such as the philosophers Dudley Shapere and Margaret Masterman objected that ‘paradigm’ was used loosely and in many senses, and his 1969 postscript was partly his answer.16
Others charged that by denying that rules of method settle which theory wins, he made science irrational. His reply was that scientists share values, accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity and fruitfulness, which guide their choices without fixing them, since people can weigh them differently; a choice not dictated by a rule, on this reply, is not therefore irrational.17
