In the course of working through the Chapter 3 material on botany and biological evolution in Cowen’s marginalism monograph I was suddenly struck by the fact that in this account of a scientific revolution, the marginalist revolution in economics, Cowen never mentions one of the most important books of the last half century, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). As Kuhn’s title proclaims, the book is about scientific revolutions, and it changed the way we think about, not only scientific revolutions, but about the intellectual enterprise in general. Kuhn’s term, “paradigm,” has become so widely adopted that it has become detached from Kuhn himself.
I decided to query Cowen’s AI about it.
Note that I had a reason for mentioning Kuhn that’s more specific than the fact that he wrote about scientific revolutions. Kuhn uses the concept of a Gestalt switch as part of his account of how revolutions come about. That seems to me to be a far more useful account than the “seeing around corners” metaphor that Cowen comes up with. Here’s how he introduces the idea (pp. 62-63):
Looking at an economy and trying to figure it out is – more than most economists realize – like staring at a very large number and trying to factor it. It is not only hard, but you don’t know where to start. “Should I try dividing it by 323,477?” Well, maybe, but it won’t be obvious that this is the correct way to proceed. Alternatively, you could say, using economic language, that the marginal cost of producing economic insight is very high, but it can be maintained, preserved, and transmitted at relatively low marginal cost. Lower than the marginal cost of learning how to paint like Johannes Vermeer.
There is no “brute force” method for obtaining fundamental economic insight. Rather, you need to peer around a corner and see something that the other people have not already seen. And once you see and grasp it, you cannot easily forget it, again reflecting the asymmetry of this path toward knowledge. So often I have heard economists make proclamations like: “Once you start thinking about the world in economic terms, you can no longer unsee those things. ”
That is exactly correct, but it is truly hard to see them in the first place. In essence, I think economics was so late to develop because it was so hard to peer around its corners. To see supply and demand in their proper workings.
Note this phrase: “the marginal cost of producing economic insight is very high, but it can be maintained, preserved, and transmitted at relatively low marginal cost.” Kuhn has that well-covered with the idea of a Gestalt switch. As I indicate in the dialog below, “It’s not so much a matter of coming up with new observations as of looking at the same field as everyone else and putting it together in a different way; instead of seeing an old crone, you see a young woman, instead of seeing a duck, you see a rabbit – to invoke two classic illustrations of the Gestalt switch.”
The full dialog is below the asterisks.
* * * * *
Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions
Is there any evidence that Cowen. has read, and absorbed, Thomas Kuhns megahit, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? He’s just written a monograph about a revolution in economics, that gives mini-case histories of other scientific revolutions as well (at the moment I’ve been thinking about botany and biological evolution), he doesn’t cite Kuhn once, if only possibly to dismiss him for this or that reason.
The Kuhn omission is real and it's damning. The search turns up nothing — no mention of Kuhn anywhere in the book, no engagement with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the blog in connection with this work, nothing. And yet the questions Tyler is asking are precisely Kuhn's questions.
Consider what Tyler is actually doing in the book. He's asking how ideas become lost, how new insights come to pass, why insights that seem obvious in retrospect weren't seen before, and why new insights arrive suddenly, in a kind of flood. That is a précis of Kuhn's project. The simultaneous eruption of marginalism across three countries and three intellectual temperaments — Jevons, Menger, Walras — is practically a textbook case of what Kuhn calls the readiness of a field for a paradigm shift. One reviewer even frames Tyler's argument in explicitly Kuhnian terms: the marginalist insight came in "a simultaneous eruption," with the answer involving "the slow assembly of preconditions," and "progress in science is rarely a matter of the lone genius, but rather of the alignment of previously dispersed elements" — the genius arrives when the ground has been prepared. That reviewer is essentially translating Tyler back into Kuhn without naming him either.
And here's where your Gombrich point connects directly. Kuhn's central conceptual contribution — the one that required slow, careful reading to absorb — was the analysis of what a paradigm actually is and how it does its cognitive work. What does it mean to see the world through a paradigm? How does anomaly accumulate? What happens cognitively and socially during a crisis period? What does it mean to see the world differently after a revolution — the famous incommensurability thesis? These are questions about the internal structure of concepts, not just their historical sequence. Tyler tracks the historical sequence of the Marginal Revolution with genuine care, noting that "scientific revolutions come about when many complementary pieces are in place, such as financial support, intellectual independence, and networks of like-minded others to talk with," but he never asks what a revolution is at the conceptual level — what makes it a revolution rather than a reform, what the cognitive structure of a paradigm shift actually involves. [On Gombrich, see note below–BB]
That's the Gombrich parallel you're drawing. Gombrich didn't just narrate the history of realistic depiction — he asked what representation is, what schemata are, how correction works cognitively. Kuhn didn't just narrate the history of scientific change — he asked what normal science is, what a paradigm does, how incommensurability works. Tyler does neither. He narrates. The concepts — revolution, insight, intuition, decline — remain unexamined.
[See text: Ch.3 · Tyler's conditions for scientific revolutions]
From marginalrevolution.com — what the blog actually shows:
The site-specific search turns up no posts where Tyler engages with Kuhn directly in connection with this book or its themes. The closest thing is:
- Stephen Pimentel's review of The Marginal Revolution A review Tyler himself flagged as excellent, which frames his argument in terms of "slow assembly of preconditions" and the alignment of dispersed elements — language that maps onto Kuhn without invoking him. Tyler endorsed this framing without noting the Kuhnian resonance.
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The trajectories of science and AI A March 2026 post where Tyler discusses scientific and technological change, including the Industrial Revolution analogy, but again with no reference to Kuhn's framework for thinking about how scientific change actually works.
The silence is consistent across the book and the blog. Tyler has written a monograph about a scientific revolution, drawn on case studies from botany and evolutionary biology, theorized about why revolutions happen when they do — and never once engaged with the person who made the analysis of scientific revolutions a serious intellectual enterprise. That's not an oversight you can attribute to ignorance. It suggests either a deliberate avoidance or, more likely, exactly what you diagnosed earlier: Tyler is operating as a historian of ideas who hasn't asked what the key concepts in his own account actually mean.
[Note: The AI is referring to Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960). I had mentioned it in another dialog with Cowen’s AI, one that I’ve not yet published in these set of observations about his marginalism monograph. It is a superb historical analysis of a cultural phenomenon, visual art, that grapples with the psychological mechanisms involved in cultural change. Gombrich draws on Gestalt psychology and talks about the schemas that artists have invented and subsequently used realistic depiction.]
Gestalt switch
I’ve got a specific reason for asking. Tyler comes up with this analogy, “seeing around a corner,” as a way of characterizing a specific kind of intellectual problem, the problem of coming up with a (revolutionary) new idea. Thomas Kuhn talked of revolutions as involving a Gestalt switch: It’s not so much a matter of coming up with new observations as of looking at the same field as everyone else and putting it together in a different way; instead of seeing an old crone, you see a young woman, instead of seeing a duck, you see a rabbit – to invoke two classic illustrations of the Gestalt switch.
Yes, and the comparison is clarifying precisely because it shows how much analytical work Kuhn's concept does that Tyler's doesn't.
"Seeing around a corner" is a spatial metaphor that implies the new knowledge is there, just occluded — you need to move to the right position and then you can see it. The information was always available; the problem is one of positioning. That's actually a fairly conventional epistemology. It implies that once you've seen around the corner, what you see is unambiguous and uncontested. It also implies that the obstacle is primarily positional — social, institutional, financial, as Tyler notes in his conditions for scientific revolutions [See text: Ch.3 · Tyler's complementary conditions for scientific...] — rather than cognitive or perceptual.
Kuhn's Gestalt switch is doing something fundamentally different. It's not that the new knowledge was occluded; it's that the same visual field gets reorganized. The duck and the rabbit are looking at identical lines on the page. The switch isn't about gaining access to new information — it's about a reorganization of the entire perceptual and conceptual framework through which existing information is interpreted. And crucially, once you've switched, you can't easily hold both organizations simultaneously. That's where Kuhn's incommensurability thesis comes from — it's not a philosophical add-on, it's built directly into the Gestalt psychology he's drawing on.
That distinction has enormous consequences for how you understand the Marginal Revolution specifically. Tyler's "seeing around a corner" suggests that pre-marginalist economists simply lacked access to certain ideas — they hadn't yet moved to the right intellectual position. But Kuhn's framework would ask something harder: were the pre-marginalist economists looking at the same economic phenomena as Jevons, Menger, and Walras, and organizing them through a fundamentally different conceptual framework that made marginalist insights not just unseen but unseeable within that framework? That's a much more interesting question, and it's the question Kuhn would force you to ask. [See text: Ch.3 · Tyler on why economic insight is hard to grasp]
