Kuhn, Naturalism, and the Social Study of Science (original) (raw)
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Normal Science and Normal Kuhn. Review of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions – 50 Years On
1962 marked an important point in intellectual history not only for historians, philosophers, sociologists and scientists but also for educated laymen. After a long and productive decade Thomas Kuhn published his Structure of Scientific Revolutions as Volume 2 Issue 2 of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, edited (after the death of Otto Neurath) by Rudolf Carnap and Charles Morris. 2012 marked another important date—it was the 50th anniversary of Structure's first edition. The many conferences, workshops and presentations were documented in special issues and collections; one of them is Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions – 50 Years On, edited by William J. Devlin and Alisa Bokulich. The review aims to shed light on the collections relevance for current interdisciplinary studies.
The Social Study of Science before Kuhn
The controversy over Thomas Kuhn's astonishingly successful Structure of Scientific Revolutions ([1962)1996), which denied the possibility of a rational account of conceptual revolutions and characterized them in the language of collective psychology, created the conditions for producing the field that became "science studies." The book was the immediate product of an existing tradition of writing about science, exemplified by the works of James Bryant Conant and Michael Polanyi, and the distal product of a literature on the social character of science that reaches back centuries. This literature was closely connected to practical problems of the organization of science and also to social theory debates on the political meaning of science. The basic story line is simple: a conflict between two views of science, one of which treats science as distinguished by a method that can be extended to social and political life, and a responding view that treats science as a distinctive form of activity with its own special problems and does not provide a model for social and political life. Interlaced with this story is a puzzle over the relationship between science and culture that flourished especially in the twenties and thirties. In this chapter I briefly reconstruct this history.
2013
Many philosophers have thought that Kuhn’s claim that there have been paradigm shifts introduced a problem for the rationality of science, because it appears that in such a change nothing can count as a neutral arbiter; even what you observe depends on which theory you already subscribe to. The history of science challenges its rationality in a different way in the pessimistic induction, where failures of our predecessors to come up with true theories about unobservable entities is taken by many to threaten the rationality of confidence in our own theories. The first problem arises from a perception of too much discontinuity, the second from an unfortunate kind of continuity, in the track record of science. I argue that both problems are only apparent, and due to under-description of the history. The continuing appeal of the pessimistic induction in particular is encouraged by narrow focus on a notion of method that Kuhn was eager to resist.
Sheldon Richmond, Review of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Revisited
The book is a collection of eleven essays. Apart from the introduction, the essays come from a conference on Kuhn. I take the essays to fall into two main categories, the orthodox and the revisionist. The orthodox category breaks into three sub-categories: 1) the historical, describing how Kuhn adapted his original ideas to the variety of responses they invoked; 2) the scholastic, which is involved in making fine distinctions not made by Kuhn in his own writings; and 3) the pragmatic, which seeks to find an application not made by Kuhn in his own writings. The second main category, the revisionist, also breaks into three sub-categories: these essays seek to recast 1) Kuhn as a Wittgensteinian; 2) Kuhn as an evolutionary epistemologist; and 3) Kuhn as a combination of social historian and developmental psychologist.
The " Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas S. Kuhn
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas S. Kuhn In the “Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Thomas Kuhn pursues developing a new way of explaining the nature of science, particularly the development of scientific thought throughout history. Thus, he poses a strong argument which lies in the idea that there is no static nature of science, and that scientific thought changes, going through revolutionary transformations. Hence Kuhn undermines logic positivism because scientific thought is explained in logical terms. The main question his position asks is, is he successful in the task he has proposed in his book? Kuhn’s principle concepts will be analyzed to study how he aims to understand the development of scientific thought. On the one hand, he defines each concept. On the other hand, each of those concepts will be analyzed in such a way to be able to argue if there is a flaw or ambiguity within the general analytical framework Kuhn deploys to explain the nature of science.
Kuhn and the actual practice of science: Examining the extent to which Kuhn's analysis is scientific
2011
In the structure of scientific revolutions hereunder referred to as SSR (1962), Kuhn claimed to have captured correctly how science is practiced. However, his critics such as Shapere (1984) argued that Kuhn’s account is far from being a true account of how science is practiced. Consequently, this led to a philosophical dispute on whether or not Kuhn’s work was a correct interpretation of how science is practiced. In the light of the foregoing debate Kuhn published his The Essential Tension (1977) to defend his position in his earlier book the SSR. In the context of this debate, this article is a philosophical analysis to determine whether or not Kuhn’s SSR is a correct empirical description of how science is practiced.