In recent years, something of a stir has been produced by the flinging of an "apple of discord" onto the usually-staid tables of science historians. The flinger was Thomas S. Kuhn; the apple flung, his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn, a historian and philosopher of science, takes issue with the common conception that scientific advancement is by way of "new discoveries". In fact really new data is seldom discovered. Scientific progress has more to do with scientists coming to formulate new ways of construing the same old information, new keys to solve the puzzles presented by the data. One such paradigm will be accepted by scientists as long as it seems to solve the puzzle. Only when the paradigm starts to appear inadequate to the task of explaining this or that phenomenon do scientists begin looking for an alternate gestalt. The new paradigm will seek to incorporate much of the explication-power of the old, preserving as much of its value as possible, yet starting from a slightly different point, so as to deal plausibly with all the hitherto-troublesome data. Needless to say, old models die hard. Their advocates do not and should not give up easily. And as a matter of fact, resistance against yielding the old model is very useful for finding out just how useful and inadequate it was, and for revealing just what the utility of a new paradigm must be. Finally, a new gestalt becomes dominant (either through widespread conversion to it, or by the death of the older generation of theorists), and thus becomes "normal science" until such time as it too is superseded.

To give a famous example of Kuhn's thesis at work, let us mention the contest between the geocentric paradigm of Ptolemy and the heliocentric paradigm of Copernicus. Ptolemy's model of the planetary system functioned well to explain the retrograde motion of the (apparently earth-orbiting) planets. However, in order to make the system work, Ptolemy and his followers had to chart out myriad series of "epicycles", wheels within hypothetical wheels, which would explain the occasional erratic orbits of certain heavenly bodies (a phenomenon explained by earlier philosophers as the "free-will" of the planets). Copernicus found that the whole system might be simplified if all the epicycles were eliminated. This could be done by postulating that the sun, not the earth, was the center of planetary orbit. Eventually, Copernicus's view predominated. It wasn't that Copernicus had somehow "discovered" the earth to be orbiting the sun instead of the other way around. Such a thing would have been (and probably still is) incapable of observation. Rather, he merely formulated a new gestalt for the data which made its explanation less problematic than before. In the same way, Kuhn argues cogently, all scientific progress has happened. Indeed, Kuhn would probably not deny that his own thesis is similarly the result of imposing a new paradigm on the data of the history of science. He has not "discovered" papers by Einstein or Newton wherein the secret of paradigm-shifting is disclosed. Rather he has merely shown that what happened in the progress of science can be better explained by the paradigm model than by the discovery model. The latter, for example, was inadequate to account for the several instances of scientific progress when no new information (no "discoveries") was forthcoming.

Kuhn'a book appeared in 1969 and has been making waves in several academic fields ever since, as more and more scholars have come to see the theory's applicability to their own theorizing. What may be surprising is that fully twenty-four years earlier than the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a remarkably similar line of thought was put forth by an anthropologist at Miskatonic University, Dr. Seneca Lapham. We refer, naturally, to a character in August Derleth's The Lurker at the Threshold, a novel based upon a few pages of notes by H. P. Lovecraft.

The relevant scene occurs late in the book, in the third and final segment entitled "Narrative of Winfield Phillips". Professor Lapham is engaged in friendly, albeit strenuous, debate with his young assistant Phillips over what to make of a remarkable written account left them by one Stephen Bates. Bates has been witness to some rather perplexing goings-on at his cousin's country estate. Of course, the cousin, Ambrose Dewart, has been trafficking with the Great Old Ones, under the psychic influence of a long-dead sorcerous ancestor. Lapham quickly discerns this reading of the events, but Phillips is as unwilling to credit it as the thick-headed Bates had been unable to see it. The problem of both men, according to Dr. Lapham, is their too-great adherence to everyday models of reality, those of conventional science. "Bates, I believe, illustrates the point very well. He has recorded what seems to be dissociated knowledge, he constantly skirts a terrifying reality, he seldom makes any genuine effort to face it; he is hampered by the superficial, by vestigial superstitions and credos which have no reality apart from the expected conventional behavior-and-belief patterns of the average human being." In other words, Bates, like Thomas Kuhn's "normal science", clings to an outworn paradigm in the face of data so troublesome that they must overthrow it. Lapham's terminology even comes remarkably close to Kuhn's. With the latter's "troublesome data", compare the former's phrase "evidence that should not be there", in the face of which, he avers, faith comes ever so reluctantly.

Against such entrenched traditionalism, Dr. Lapham contends that the true scientist must be willing to adopt models which are appropriate to all the data, no matter how radical such models might at first seem. "I am afraid you are not taking Mr. Bates and his story very seriously, Phillips." The narrator replies, "Well, it is certainly the most bizarre rigamarole ever adduced to explain those mysterious disappearances." To which Dr. Lapham rejoins: "No more bizarre than the circumstances of the disappearances and reappearances themselves." Yes, the proposed model seems strange, but then what else are we to do with the "strange" data?

If there is a remarkable parallel between the reasoning of Seneca Lapham in The Lurker at the Threshold and that of Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the results of their respective inquiries are far-removed from each other. After all, Kuhn is dealing with real scientific research, whereas August Derleth, speaking through Seneca Lapham, is simply writing a good story. In the context of the story all this business about paradigms and models is merely a device to lend verisimilitude. Derleth certainly did not believe in the Great Old Ones for whose existence the character Lapham is made to argue.

There is even a fairly clear hint in the story that Derleth was not too impressed at the way real-life pseudoscientific eccentrics appealed to the same kind of argument. He has Dr. Lapham invoke a host of data for the paranormal collected by Charles Fort. While for the purpose of the story, all this is to be taken seriously, Derleth himself apparently took Fort's claims about as seriously as Winfield Phillips took Bates's story. Lapham's recital of Fort's list of curiosities is prefaced with a significant caution: "Consider a few facts, and I say 'facts' advisedly, allowing for the well-known unreliability of human observers." With these words, Derleth calls to mind the argument of David Hume that people are notoriously enthusiastic legend-mongers, and that therefore reports of miracles would always be more plausibly accounted for as misapprehensions than as true events. Similarly, E. F. Bradley in The Presuppositions of Critical History warns that accounts of qualitatively new events, those unparalleled by our current experience, could only be accepted if we could be sure the observer/reporter brought with him the same standards of critical judgment we ourselves as historians or scientists would use. One suspects that Derleth properly realized that Fort's "facts" did not pass this test. But it is certainly to his credit that he knew how to craft the scene so that his fictional anthropologist Seneca Lapham seems to press home his case in a genuinely scientific manner, and one which anticipated Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by twenty-four years.