Nutrition and Physical Regeneration

[Editor's note: The following post should go a long way in helping the reader understand why ancient truth, be it nutritional or otherwise, often has a difficult time getting a modern hearing. It also helps explain why one generation with the truth, would seem to yield that truth for an untruth in succeeding generations].

Unquestionably the most significant and challenging development in the historiography of science in the last decade is the theory of Thomas S. Kuhn. Without defending Kuhn's questionable subjectivist and relativistic philosophy, his contribution is a brilliant sociological insight into the ways in which scientific theories change and develop.¹

Essentially, Kuhn's theory is a critical challenge to what might be called the "Whig theory of the history of science." This "Whig" theory, which until Kuhn was the unchallenged orthodoxy in the field, sees the progress of science as a gradual, continuous, ever-upward process; year by year, decade by decade, century by century, the body of scientific knowledge gradually grows and accretes through the process of framing hypotheses, testing them empirically, and discarding the invalid and keeping the valid theories. Every age stands on the shoulders of and sees further and more clearly than every preceding age.

In the Whig approach, furthermore, there is no substantive knowledge to be gained from reading, say, 19th-century physicists or 17th-century astronomers. We may be interested in reading Priestley or Newton or Maxwell to see how creative minds work or solve problems, or for insight into the history of the period; but we can never read them to learn something about science which we didn't know already. After all, their contributions are, almost by definition, incorporated into the latest textbooks or treatises in their disciplines.

Many of us, in our daily experience, know enough to be unhappy with this idealized version of the development of science.

Without endorsing the validity of Immanuel Velikovsky's theory, for example, we have seen Velikovsky brusquely and angrily dismissed by the scientific community without waiting for the patient testing of the open-minded scientist, which we have been led to believe is the essence of scientific inquiry.² And we have seen Rachel Carson's critique of pesticides generally scorned by scientists only to be adopted a decade later.

But it took Professor Kuhn to provide a comprehensive model of the adoption and maintenance of scientific belief. Basically, he states that scientists, in any given area, come to adopt a fundamental vision or matrix of an explanatory theory, a vision that Kuhn calls a "paradigm." And whatever the paradigm, whether it be the atomic theory or the phlogiston theory, once adopted the paradigm governs all the scientists in the field without being any longer checked or questioned — as the Whig model would have it.

But then, gradually, more and more anomalies pile up; puzzles can no longer be solved by the paradigm. But the scientists do not give up the paradigm; quite the contrary, increasingly desperate attempts are made to modify the particulars of the basic theory so as to fit the unpleasant facts and to preserve the framework provided by the paradigm.

When this occurs, there arrives a "scientific revolution," a chaotic period during which one paradigm is replaced by another, which never occurs smoothly as the Whig theory would suggest. And even here, the older scientists, mired in their intellectual vested interests, will often cling to the obsolete paradigm, with the new theory only being adopted by the younger and more flexible scientists. Thus, of the codiscoverers of oxygen in the late 18th century, Priestley and Lavoisier, Joseph Priestley never — till the day he died — conceded that he had in fact discovered oxygen; to the end he insisted that what he had discovered was merely "dephlogisticated air," thus remaining within the framework of the phlogiston theory.³

And so, armed with Kuhn's own paradigm of the history of scientific theories, which is now in the process of replacing the Whig framework, we see a very different picture of the process of science. Instead of a slow and gradual upward march into the light, testing and revising at each step of the way, we see a series of "revolutionary" leaps, as paradigms displace each other only after much time, travail, and resistance.

Furthermore, without adopting Kuhn's own philosophical relativism, it becomes clear that, since intellectual vested interests play a more dominant role than continual open-minded testing, it may well happen that a successor paradigm is less correct than a predecessor. And if that is true, then we must always be open to the possibility that, indeed, we often know less about a given science now than we did decades or even centuries ago.

Because paradigms become discarded and are never looked at again, the world may have forgotten scientific truth that was once known, as well as added to its stock of knowledge. Reading older scientists now opens up the distinct possibility that we may learn something that we haven't known — or have collectively forgotten — about the discipline. Professor de Grazia states that "much more is discovered and forgotten than is known," and much that has been forgotten may be more correct than theories that are now accepted as true.⁴

If the Kuhn thesis is correct about the physical sciences, where we can obtain empirical and laboratory tests of hypotheses fairly easily, how much more must it be true in philosophy and the social sciences, where no such laboratory tests are possible!
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Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the Austrian School. He was an economist, economic historian, and libertarian political philosopher.

This article, of which the above is only an excerpt, was composed for the occasion of Ludwig von Mises's 90th birthday. It appears in the Modern Age (Fall 1971): 370–79. It also appeared in Rothbard, The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School (Glos, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 1997), pp. 195–210. You can read the full article here.

Notes

1 Philosophically, Kuhn tends to deny the existence of objective truth and therefore denies the possibility of genuine scientific progress. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

2 On the sociology of the reception of Velikovsky in the scientific community, see Alfred de Grazia, "The Scientific Reception Systems," in The Velikovsky Affair, Alfred de Grazia, ed. (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1966), pp. 171–231.

3 Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 53–56.

4 de Grazia, "The Scientific Reception Systems," p. 197.