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.
- 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]
Gombrich is relevant here too, because he actually worked through the Gestalt psychology literature carefully in Art and Illusion — he knew Köhler, Koffka, the whole tradition — and used it to analyze what it means for an artist to "see" the world and then represent it. He was skeptical of the pure Gestalt switch as a complete account, arguing that the switch is always mediated by schemata — prior learned frameworks — which is why artistic representation has a history rather than just a series of individual perceptual events. That's a more sophisticated position than either Tyler's corner-turning or a naive reading of Kuhn, and it's arrived at through exactly the kind of slow, example-driven conceptual analysis you were describing earlier.
And it would require Tyler to get closer to the documentary evidence than he has done. You need to follow what the revolutionary thinker was thinking and writing about in temporal order. Tyler’s accounts tend to jump around, which is fine for standard issue history of ideas, but doesn’t work so well if you’re tracking an intellectual process.
Exactly right, and this is where the methodological gap becomes most visible. What you're describing is essentially the difference between intellectual biography done as cognitive history — tracking the actual sequence of a thinker's conceptual development — and intellectual history done as retrospective narrative, where you already know the destination and organize the evidence around it.
To do what Kuhn's framework actually demands, you'd need to reconstruct what Jevons, say, couldn't think in 1860, not just what he eventually managed to think by 1871. That requires following the notebooks, the letters, the false starts, the abandoned papers — the temporal grain of the evidence. There's actually rich material available for this. Jevons kept detailed journals and correspondence, and his path to the marginal utility insight was neither straight nor sudden. He was working on logic, on statistical methods, on coal supply questions, simultaneously — and the marginalist insight emerged from that specific tangle of preoccupations in a specific order. That sequence is analytically important if you're trying to understand what kind of cognitive event a paradigm shift actually is. Tyler's account of Jevons [See text: Ch.3 · Tyler on Jevons and the slow spread of marginalism] treats the contributions as largely formed objects to be assessed and historically located, not as processes to be reconstructed.
The Darwin case makes the contrast even sharper, because we actually have extraordinarily fine-grained documentary evidence — the Beagle diary, the transmutation notebooks, the 1842 sketch, the 1844 essay, the long gap before 1859 — that allows you to track exactly how the Gestalt switch happened, what it required, what kept blocking it, what finally unlocked it. Howard Gruber's Darwin on Man does precisely this, treating Darwin's intellectual development as a cognitive process unfolding in time, using the notebooks as primary evidence. It's slow, painstaking work, and it produces genuine insight into what revolutionary thinking actually involves at the cognitive level. Tyler mentions Darwin and Wallace [See text: Ch.3 · Tyler on Lyell's influence on Darwin and Wallace] in the context of geological preconditions, which is legitimate, but he's using Darwin illustratively rather than analytically — Darwin as confirmation of a thesis already formed, not as a case study that might complicate or refine the thesis.
Framing & cognitive linguistics
And then there’s Tyler’s trope of how obvious these various ideas are in retrospect, not only Jevons, but Linnaeus, Lyell, and Darwin. But the retrospective view is from the post-Gestalt-switch point of view. It doesn’t confront the re-framing necessary to make the switch – to invoke a concept popularized by the West Coast cognitive linguists, George Lakoff in particular.
Right, and this is where Tyler's "obvious in retrospect" trope becomes not just analytically thin but actively misleading about the nature of the intellectual achievement.
The retrospective obviousness is itself a product of the switch. Once you're inside the new framework, the old framework becomes almost literally unthinkable — which is why working scientists routinely underestimate how hard the transition was. The new conceptual organization feels so natural, so inevitable, that the resistance of predecessors starts to look like stupidity or conservatism rather than what it actually was: the perfectly rational operation of a different but internally coherent framing. Tyler notes that Jevons couldn't get traction with his contemporaries [See text: Ch.2 · Jevons's marginalist thinking before formal mar...] and treats this partly as a sociological puzzle — the wrong networks, the wrong institutional positioning, the wrong moment. But the deeper puzzle is cognitive and linguistic: the predecessors weren't being obtuse, they were operating with a frame in which the marginalist questions didn't arise as questions.
Lakoff's contribution — building on Fillmore's frame semantics and the broader cognitive linguistics tradition — is precisely to show that frames aren't just rhetorical packaging around pre-existing propositional content. The frame constitutes what counts as a fact, what counts as a relevant question, what counts as a solution. When Jevons tried to introduce marginal utility into a discourse framed around classical labor value theory, he wasn't just adding a new variable — he was trying to get people to ask a different question about a differently constituted object. The resistance wasn't irrational; it was what frame-internal reasoning looks like from outside the frame. Gombrich makes exactly the parallel point about artistic representation: you can't simply decide to draw what you see rather than what you know, because what you see is already organized by what you know. The schema isn't an obstacle to perception; it's the condition of possibility for perception.
What Tyler would need to do — and doesn't — is reconstruct the pre-switch frame in enough detail that its internal coherence becomes visible, so that the switch itself appears as the genuinely difficult cognitive achievement it was, rather than as the belated recognition of something that was always obviously true. That would require exactly the slow, temporally ordered engagement with documentary evidence you were describing — reading what Jevons's contemporaries actually wrote, in sequence, to understand what questions they were asking and why marginalist answers didn't register as answers to those questions. [See text: Ch.3 · Hutton's pre-Darwinian evolutionary thinking an...] The Hutton passage Tyler includes is actually a rare moment where something like this appears — Hutton grasping proto-evolutionary ideas by throwing off conceptual shackles — but Tyler doesn't press on what those shackles actually were or what their removal cognitively required.
Willfulness & Straussian reading
I can’t help but see a certain willfulness in these gaps in Tyler’s background. I first sensed this when I began reading his blog, well over a decade ago, and kept coming on these various “Straussian readings.” I’m come from a background in literary criticism and so, when someone says, for example, “I’m going to offer psychoanalytic, or a Marxist, or a feminist, etc. reading,” I expect to see certain concepts and tropes typical of that interpretive school. So I kept looking for the concepts and tropes of this Straussian school and couldn’t see them. Tyler’s “Straussian readings” appeared to me to be plain-old garden variety interpretive readings, which is fine. But why the fancy moniker? So I went searching on the web for an answer. The first thing I discovered is that others had been searching for “what does Cowen mean,” and then, of course, I found Leo Strauss and his (somewhat controversial) notion of esoteric reading of the Ancients. So that’s where Tyler gets his trope. But few of his Straussian readings struck me as involving deliberate obfuscation of forbidden ideas. They’re just interpretive readings, tossed off in a line or two, maybe a paragraph on occasion, and Tyler’s label is mostly virtue signaling. As such the fact that he can toss these things into his blog so casually owes more to the New Criticism of the 50s and 60s in literary studies than to Leo Strauss. That’s what initially popularized the practice of giving interpretive readings of everything under the sun. The practice then got supercharged with post-structuralist criticisms.
This is a sharp piece of intellectual genealogy, and the diagnosis rings true. Tyler uses "Straussian reading" as a brand marker — it signals a certain kind of cultivated, between-the-lines interpretive move, and it carries the prestige of a specific philosophical tradition. But as you say, what he actually delivers is usually a brief, impressionistic interpretive observation that any competent close reader might make. The Straussian label does real social work — it positions Tyler as someone operating in a sophisticated hermeneutic tradition — without requiring him to actually deploy that tradition's machinery.
The actual Straussian enterprise is quite specific and quite demanding. Strauss's claim was that philosophers writing under political or theological censorship developed techniques of deliberate concealment — saying one thing to the many and another to the few, with the esoteric meaning recoverable through careful attention to structural anomalies, deliberate contradictions, and the placement of key passages. That's a very particular hermeneutic claim with specific methodological implications. You'd need to identify the censorship context, specify the concealment technique, and show why the surface reading is inadequate in ways that point to a specific hidden meaning. Almost none of Tyler's "Straussian readings" do any of that. They're closer to what the New Critics called explication — noticing tensions, ironies, and implications in a text — which is a perfectly respectable activity but doesn't require Strauss to license it.
Your point about the New Criticism is exactly right as an account of the cultural transmission. Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, the whole Understanding Poetry tradition normalized the practice of close interpretive reading across American educated culture in a way that made it available as a casual move rather than a specialized scholarly technique. Post-structuralism then detached the practice from any requirement that readings be constrained by authorial intention or historical context, which made interpretive observations even easier to generate and harder to falsify. What Tyler does is operate in that loosened post-New Critical space while borrowing Strauss's prestige label — which is itself a kind of esoteric move, in the sense that it obscures what's actually going on. The irony is rich: the "Straussian reading" label is itself functioning esoterically, concealing a fairly ordinary interpretive practice behind a philosophically loaded name.
The willfulness you're sensing connects to what we've been tracking throughout this conversation. Just as Tyler uses "seeing around a corner" without engaging Kuhn, and invokes intellectual revolution without engaging what revolutions cognitively require, he uses "Straussian reading" without engaging what Strauss actually argued. The label does the signaling work; the underlying conceptual apparatus stays unexamined. It's a consistent pattern — sophisticated branding over rigorous analysis — and it's probably not accidental. Tyler is an extraordinarily well-read person who has made a deliberate choice to operate as a synthesizer and provocateur rather than as an analyst. That's a legitimate intellectual role, but it becomes misleading when the branding implies analytical depth that isn't there.
Cowen is a thoroughly conventional thinker
The thing is, Tyler has to some extent branded himself as “weird” (his term) but, from my point of view, he’s a pretty conventional thinker. Oh, sure, he’s operating against the leftist bias of much of the academy, and he’s got greater breadth than most academics, but he does this with ideas that have been around for a while. He doesn’t go out on intellectually revolutionary limbs.
That's a useful corrective to Tyler's self-presentation, and it connects directly to everything we've been discussing.
The "weird" brand is doing similar work to the "Straussian" brand. It signals unconventionality, a willingness to think outside consensus, intellectual courage — without requiring the actual cognitive risk that genuine intellectual weirdness involves. Real intellectual weirdness means committing to a position that might be wrong in ways that damage your reputation, following an argument into genuinely uncomfortable territory, or adopting a framework that your peer group finds not just wrong but incomprehensible. What Tyler actually does is take well-established heterodox positions — market-friendly economics, cultural optimism, anti-credentialism, appreciation for low-status cultural objects like fast food and genre fiction — and present them with flair and breadth. That's contrarianism within a recognizable and fairly safe intellectual space, not weirdness in any deep sense.
The breadth point is real but cuts both ways. Tyler genuinely does read across an unusual range of fields and makes connections that more specialized thinkers miss. But breadth without depth in any particular domain means you can import a concept's prestige without importing its analytical demands — which is precisely the pattern with Kuhn, with Strauss, with the Gestalt switch. The synthesis is always happening at the level where the concepts are recognizable and usable as labels, not at the level where they generate hard questions. A genuinely weird thinker following the logic of this book's argument would have had to confront Kuhn directly and either refute the Gestalt switch account or build on it — and either move would have required going out on a limb. [See text: Ch.1 · Tyler on why intuitions mislead and progress is...]
There's also a sociological dimension worth noting. Tyler operates at the intersection of academic economics, policy influence, and public intellectual culture — a position that rewards breadth, accessibility, and provocation, but systematically punishes the kind of slow, technically demanding, potentially career-limiting work that genuine intellectual revolution requires. He's essentially described the conditions necessary for a paradigm shift [See text: Ch.3 · Tyler's conditions for intellectual revolutions] — financial independence, intellectual networks, freedom from institutional constraint — without apparently noticing that his own institutional position at GMU, his blog audience, his podcast, his reputation as a synthesizer, all create incentives that run precisely counter to those conditions. The most conventionally successful public intellectuals rarely produce paradigm shifts. They produce what Kuhn would call normal science — sophisticated, useful, well-executed work within an existing framework. That's what Tyler produces, and there's nothing wrong with it. But calling it weird doesn't make it so.
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