Two Myths: Corporate Personality and Language/Mentality Determinism

1990 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley E. Porter

Certain myths are often perpetuated in a discipline, myths which upon later reflection are seen to be what they in fact are: unhelpful, deceptive or simply wrong. Often these myths are perpetuated in spite of good evidence to the contrary. This tendency is not unique to Biblical studies but is a pattern that is found in a range of disciplines. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, addresses this tendency in the so-called hard sciences. He does not use the term myth but rather speaks of the presuppositions of normal science, the scientific paradigm which controls the scientific community of a given time. But as is so often the case, growing evidence mounts that the model is unsatisfactory, that it fails in significant ways to explain evidence which is increasingly seen to be important. The evidence mounts, until a paradigm shift occurs, when the significant or major practitioners of a discipline realise that a new model must be invoked to explain the data at hand.

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER E. GORDON

Anyone who works at the interstices of intellectual history and philosophy and the history and philosophy of science will be quick to rank Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions amongst the most influential works of the last half-century. But its influence extends well beyond these disciplines as well. First published in 1962 as a contribution to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, over the last fifty years it has enjoyed a rich afterlife, leaving in its wake an immense if contested inventory of ideas whose significance has transcended the well-policed boundaries that often separate the natural sciences from the social sciences and the humanities. Even more surprising for a book of its academic character, it has enjoyed a reception in popular discourse that exceeds its disciplinary bailiwick. Its trademark terms—not only the celebrated ideas of a paradigm and a paradigm shift but also more technical themes such as normal science, incommensurability, and anomaly—have been naturalized into mundane English with a degree of success that puts to shame just about any other work of recent scholarship. Paraphrasing one of its characteristic claims, one may be temped to observe that, since the publication of Kuhn's Structure, we all live in a different world.


Author(s):  
Göksel Yıkmış

In this article, I will explore Kuhn’s arguments concerning his claims of “paradigm shift in science is irrational”. First, I will do this by looking into Kuhn’s opinions about paradigms, normal science, and revolutions by taking reference to his writings. Second, I will try to understand influences and ideas located in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. Third, I will look into the scientific examples that related to Kuhn’s claims about paradigm changes as irrational. I considered the paramount importance of historical and well-known examples in science. This is as to why and how Kuhn has concluded and understood the stages and effects of paradigm changes are irrational in the collective thinking of the masses in the science world. To get the bottom of Kuhn’s claims in the light of wider scientific changes, I will try to demonstrate relationships between Kuhn’s specific notions and these scientific examples. To do this, I came up with the main question and two close objectives so that complete the article in a manner that the article focuses on deeper layers of Kuhn’s claims how paradigm changes in science are irrational.


1994 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilana Löwy

O médico e epistemologista Ludwik Fleck desenvolveu, nas décadas de 1920-30, uma abordagem bastante original para o estudo das ciências. Ele apoiou sua epistemologia em duas bases: por um lado, em sua própria experiência profissional de bacteriologista e imunologista; por outro, na reflexão da Escola Polonesa de Filosofia da Medicina sobre as práticas dos médicos. Tal escola julga que os 'fatos científicos' são construídos por comunidades de pesquisadores - segundo os termos de Fleck, "coletivos de pensamento". Cada coletivo de pensamento elabora um "estilo de pensamento" único, composto pelo conjunto de normas, saberes e práticas partilhados por tal coletivo. Os recém-chegados são socializados em seu estilo de pensamento particular e adotam, portanto, seu olhar específico sobre o mundo. Os fatos científicos produzidos pelos membros de um dado coletivo de pensamento trazem sempre a marca de seu estilo de pensamento. Graças a isso, eles são incomensuráveis com os 'fatos' produzidos por outros coletivos de pensamento. A incomensurabilidade dos fatos científicos, aumentadas pela necessidade de 'traduzi-los' em outro estilo de pensamento para sua utilização pelas outras comunidades profissionais é, aos olhos de Fleck, uma fonte importante de inovação nas ciências e na sociedade. Por muito tempo esquecidas, as idéias de Fleck foram redescobertas nas décadas de 1960-70, em primeiro lugar por Thomas Kuhn (que, na introdução de The structure of scientific revolutions presta uma homenagem explícita à sua obra), depois pelos sociólogos das ciências. Além de sua influência diretamente perceptível, a epistemologia de Fleck mostra profundas afinidades com as novas tendências que se afirmam no estudo das ciências: a consideração das práticas dos pesquisadores e o interesse por suas técnicas materiais, discursivas e sociais.


2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 2584-2588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cláudio José de Souza ◽  
Zenith Rosa Silvino

ABSTRACT Objective: To reflect on the key concepts of the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and its applicability in professional master's in nursing. Method: This is a theoretical-reflective study that uses the philosophical and epistemological conceptions of the philosopher Thomas Samuel Kuhn to consider its applicability on the paradigm shift of stricto sensu graduate courses in nursing. The main concepts of Kuhn were used as support: paradigm, anomaly, scientific community and scientific revolution. Results: The propositions of this philosopher are applied to and support the theoretical reflection on professional master's programs, contributing to clarify what would be a paradigmatic visionary perspective in stricto sensu master's models in nursing. Conclusion: From Kuhn's propositions it was possible to conclude that professional master's programs in nursing can break away from the dominant paradigm, strengthening a scientific revolution within the academia.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 206-226
Author(s):  
Sam Keenan

This paper provides the outline of a ‘step ladder model’ (SLM) comprising 12 steps of scientific discovery making. It incorporates both a ‘leap-off point’ from Kuhn'sStructure of Scientific Revolutions, and ideas from Jungian psychology to reveal patterns in the way in which scientific discoveries are made, across 40 examples from the history of science. The current consensus is that these discoveries are accidental. This paper aims to provide a model for deliberately making dream-based scientific discoveries. The key to this model is intrapsychic patterns in how discoveries of this kind can be made. As these patterns become gradually clearer, greater understanding of the dream-based scientific discovery-making process can develop. Gradually as a collective endeavour, as the SLM develops, the dream-based scientific discovery process can by degrees become less accidental, and progressively more deliberate.


Author(s):  
Leonardo Díaz

RESUMENA finales de los años 80s, Thomas Kuhn y Charles Taylor fueron invitados a un debate en La Salle University. Taylor defendió que las ciencias naturales no son ciencias hermenéuticas, pues se fundamentan en datos puros, carentes de significado. Kuhn rechazó la tesis de la existencia de datos puros, sosteniendo que las ciencias naturales operan con significados y poseen una base hermenéutica. En la postura de Kuhn pueden apreciarse ambivalencias como resultado de sus viejos compromisos teóricos con el proyecto explicativo formulado en La estructura de las revoluciones científicas y como mostraré, vinculado a la existencia de una tensión entre dos perspectivas filosóficas sobre la ciencia.PALABRAS CLAVEHERMENÉUTICA, CIENCIA NORMAL, CIENCIA REVOLUCIONARIA, TENSIÓN, CIENCIAS HUMANASABSTRACTBy the end of the 1980s, Thomas Kuhn and Charles Taylor participated in a debate at La Salle University. Taylor defended that natural sciences are not hermeneutical sciences, since they are based on the pure, meaningless data. Kuhn rejected the thesis of the existence of pure data, arguing that natural sciences work with meanings and have a hermeneutic foundation. Kuhn’s position presents ambivalences as a result of his former theoretical commitments with the explicative project formulated in The Structure of the Scientific Revolutions and as I will show, linked to the existence of a tension between two philosophical perspectives on science.KEYWORDSHERMENEUTICS, NORMAL SCIENCE, REVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE, TENSION, HUMAN SCIENCES


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-413
Author(s):  
Lorraine Daston

Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is the bestselling and most-cited book ever published in the history and philosophy of science. Yet very few scholars in those fields would now endorse the book’s main claims, and many are critical of its central premise: namely, that major changes in different disciplines and diverse historical contexts conform to a single “structure.” Key Kuhnian concepts such as “paradigm shift” have become part of everyday language but all but disappeared from specialist publications. Nonetheless, the book still galvanizes readers encountering it for the first time—or even scholars who haven’t reread it since their own student days. Kuhn’s description of allencompassing and incommensurable mental worlds inhabited by scientists who practice in different paradigms resonates with the experience of readers who have experienced seismic changes in moral and political intuitions.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Tipler ◽  
Wesley Bollinger

If, as Thomas Kuhn suggested in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Copernicus was not superior to Ptolemy, why was Ptolemy rejected? Was Copernican theory more elegant? Frank Tipler shows that Tycho Brahe compared their predictions with his own observations. The winner, on balance, was Copernicus.


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