A Willingness for Crisis

Cavell and Kuhn

Abstract

In one of the excerpts from memory composing his autobiography, Stanley Cavell recalls attending “an informal but extended discussion among professional philosophers” with Thomas Kuhn, then his colleague at Berkeley. It was the first such meeting the two friends had sat through together, and Cavell describes the vivid impression left on the historian of science: “As we left the scene Kuhn pressed his fingers to his forehead as if it ached. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it. You people don’t behave like academics in any other field. You treat each other as if you are all mad.’” The perception, Cavell notes, “seemed right […] but normal enough, and because normal, suddenly revelatory.” Kuhn’s response clearly anticipates topics and arguments that would come to inform The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Articulated within the terms of those arguments, the exasperating scene becomes one of philosophical discussion in the absence of a paradigm, unable to take place upon an assumed common ground.