However, it appears that Kuhn's understanding of the history of science took shape through his own efforts to make sense of important episodes in the history of science while teaching in the General Education in Science curriculum at Harvard, rather than building on prior traditions.Īnother question arises from the fact of its surprising publication in the Encyclopedia. And Alexandre Koyré's studies of Galileo are relevant too ( From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe ) Koyré made plain the "revolutionary" character of Galileo's thought within the history of science. Henri Poincaré ( The Foundations of Science: Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, Science and Methods ) and Pierre Duhem ( The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory ) are examples of thinkers who brought a knowledge of the history of science into their thinking about the logic of science. One is the question of origins: where did Kuhn's basic intuitions come from? Was the idea of a paradigm a bolt from the blue, or was there a comprehensible line of intellectual development that led to it? There certainly was a strong tradition of study of the history of science from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century but Kuhn was the first to bring this tradition into explicit dialogue with the philosophy of science. (Alexander Bird provides a good essay on Kuhn in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)Ī couple of questions are particularly interesting today, approaching fifty years after the writing of the book. By learning to use the instruments and perform the experiments, the budding scientist learns to see the world in a paradigm-specific way. Like Polanyi, Kuhn emphasizes the concrete practical knowledge that is a fundamental component of scientific education ( post). There are no crucial experiments - instead, anomalies accumulate and eventually the advocates of an old paradigm die out and leave the field to practitioners of a new paradigm. Paradigms are in some ways incommensurable - Kuhn alluded to gestalt psychology to capture the idea that a paradigm structures our perceptions of the world. Paradigms are not subject to testing or justification in fact, empirical procedures are embedded within paradigms.
A paradigm includes a diverse set of elements - conceptual schemes, research techniques, bodies of accepted data and theory, and embedded criteria and processes for the validation of results. Science really gets underway when a scientific tradition has succeeded on formulating a paradigm. The main threads of Kuhn's approach to science are well known. And the framework threatened to lead to a kind of cognitive relativism: "truth" is relative to a set of extra-rational conventions of conceptual scheme and interpretation of data. Kuhn forced us to ask questions about truth, justification, and conceptual discovery - even as he provided a basis for being skeptical about the stronger claims for scientific rationality by positivists like Reichenbach and Carnap. And it cast into doubt the most fundamental assumptions of positivism as a theory of how the science enterprise actually works.Īnd yet it also preserved an epistemological perspective. It legitimated the introduction of the study of the history of science into the philosophy of science - and thereby also legitimated the perspective of sociological study of the actual practices of science. For one thing, it shifted the focus from the context of justification to the context of discovery. (See earlier posts on the Vienna Circle post, post.) And almost immediately it stimulated a profound change in the fundamental questions that defined the philosophy of science. The book was published in the Vienna Circle's International Encyclopedia of Unified Science in 1962. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) brought about a paradigm shift of its own, in the way that philosophers thought about science.
0 kommentar(er)
