scholarly journals Kuhn and Wittgenstein: The Paradigm Priority Problem, Relativism and Incommensurability

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Wagner Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Theory Of Science ◽  
Traditional Conception ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
On Certainty ◽  
Scientific Revolutions ◽  
Structure Of Scientific Revolutions ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
Conceptual Changes ◽  
History Of

For dropping the incommensurability idea elaborated at the time of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn dismisses the concept of “revolution”. The incommensurability involved the incomparability of theories. In this new environment, the revolution is replaced by conceptual reformulation and the incommensurability becomes occasional. The linguistic turn in Kuhn’s thought involves conceptual changes whose aim is to get around the accusation of relativism that the former notion of incommensurability arouses. The most fundamental effect of these conceptual reformulations is the commitment to a traditional conception of semantics. It changes the comprehension of the historical and social nature of the foundations of the changes that scientific knowledge goes through. The comparison between the answer to the problem of paradigm priority attributed by Kuhn to Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein by himself shows that the basis of the normative nature of paradigm commitment is an essentialist concern. In the second half of this paper, I will evaluate Kuhn’s manner of getting around the problems of incommensurability in contrast to Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy dealing with similar issues in On Certainty. This enables one to essay answers to the problems of incommensurability without relativism or any commitment to a traditional conception of semantics. These contrasts show how far Kuhn’s new theory of science departs from the Wittgensteinian inspiration and abandons the point of view of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The development of these two halves makes it possible to indicate reasons to believe that questions concerning the theory and history of science can benefit largely from a grammatical exploration, which gives rise to a theory of science inspired by Wittgenstein’s thought, as Mauro Condé suggests.

RISE, GRUBENHUND: ON PROVINCIALIZING KUHN

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
DEBORAH R. COEN
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Ludwik Fleck ◽  
Scientific Revolutions ◽  
Visual Metaphors ◽  
Structure Of Scientific Revolutions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Kuhnian Revolution ◽  
Neutral Ground

Bilingualism was Kuhn's solution to the problem of relativism, the problem raised by his own theory of incommensurability. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that scientific theories are separated by gulfs of mutual incomprehension. There is no neutral ground from which to judge one theory fitter than another. Each is formulated in its own language and cannot be translated into the idiom of another. Yet, like many Americans, Kuhn never had the experience of moving comfortably between languages. “I've never been any good really at foreign languages,” he admitted in an interview soon before his death. “I can read French, I can read German, if I'm dropped into one of those countries I can stammer along for a while, but my command of foreign languages is not good, and never has been, which makes it somewhat ironic that much of my thought these days goes to language.” Kuhn may have been confessing to more than a personal weakness. His linguistic ineptitude seems to be a clue to his overweening emphasis on the difficulty of “transworld travel.” Multilingualism remained for him an abstraction. In this respect, I will argue, Kuhn engendered a peculiarly American turn in the history of science. Kuhn's argument for the dependence of science on the norms of particular communities has been central to the development of studies of science in and as culture since the 1980s. Recent work on the mutual construction of science and nationalism, for instance, is undeniably in Kuhn's debt. Nonetheless, the Kuhnian revolution cut off other avenues of research. In this essay, I draw on the counterexample of the physician–historian Ludwik Fleck, as well as on critiques by Steve Fuller and Ted Porter, to suggest one way to situate Kuhn within the broader history of the history of science. To echo Kuhn's own visual metaphors, one of the profound effects of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the field of history of science was to render certain modes of knowledge production virtually invisible.

Combining Kuhn and Jung: outlining a ‘step ladder model’ (SLM) for scientific discovery and paradigm shift research

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 206-226
Author(s):  
Sam Keenan
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
Jungian Psychology ◽  
Discovery Process ◽  
Scientific Revolutions ◽  
Ladder Model ◽  
Structure Of Scientific Revolutions ◽  
12 Steps ◽  
History Of

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.

scholarly journals Getting Emotional: Wittgenstein, van Fraassen, and Making Sense of Revolution

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Charles Djordjevic
Keyword(s):  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Van Fraassen ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
On Certainty ◽  
Individual Account ◽  
Scientific Revolutions ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
History Of ◽  
Do So

This paper aims to demonstrate the fecundity of pairing specific insights from On Certainty with research in the philosophy and history of the natural sciences. To do so, it discusses one set of related themes in the work that focus on the possibility of and nature of revolutionary change. Specifically, I argue that several of Wittgenstein’s rather gnomic remarks presage van Fraassen’s insistence on the need for decisions and emotions throughout scientific revolutions. Moreover, I argue that reading both together enriches each’s individual account and helps further make sense of why and how conversion is not just a ‘mad leap in the dark’.

What’s Forgotten About The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-339
Author(s):  
Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Scientific Revolutions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Structure Of Scientific Revolutions ◽  
History Of

Abstract Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a classic, and it is certainly not forgotten. However, an essential aspect about it has been neglected. That is, Kuhn’s Structure is a book in philosophy of history in the sense that Structure attempts gives an account of historical events, focuses on the whole of the history of science and stipulates a structure of the history of science to explain historical events. Kuhn’s book and its contribution to the debates about the progress of science and the contingency and inevitability of the history of science shows why and how philosophy of history is relevant for the history and philosophy of science. Its successful integration of historical and philosophical aspects in one account makes it worthwhile reading also for philosophers of history in the twentieth-first century. In particular, it raises the question whether the historical record can justify philosophical views and comprehensive syntheses of the past.

Scientific Revolutions

Philosophy ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Nickles
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Practice ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Scientific Change ◽  
Scientific Development ◽  
Scientific Revolutions ◽  
Structure Of Scientific Revolutions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Scientific Decision

Scientific revolutions and the problem of understanding deep scientific change became central topics in philosophy of science with Thomas S. Kuhn’s publication in 1962 of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (see Kuhn 1970, cited under General Overviews). Kuhn attacked the received view of the logical empiricists and Popperians that scientific change is cumulative. He claimed that there have been several revolutions since the so-called scientific revolution, including dramatic overturnings in the most mature sciences—with more to be expected in the future. Kuhn’s more dynamic model of scientific development postulated the existence of occasional crises that sometimes trigger full-scale revolutions that overthrow the old “paradigm” and replace it with a new one discontinuous or “incommensurable” with the old one. He rejected the received views of scientific rationality and denied that even the most successful sciences are progressing toward a final, representational truth about the world. By focusing on finished, “textbook” science, defenders of the received view, he argued, presented an inadequate account of how scientific research is done, leaving unexplained the marked difference between the mature natural sciences and the social sciences as well as the difference within a mature science itself between “normal science” and the extraordinary research context of science in crisis. Kuhn and an entire generation of historically oriented philosophers of science believed that philosophical models of science should be more naturalistic (not based on a priori normative claims), more reflective of scientific practice, and thus testable against the history of science. Unlike the logicians of science, Kuhn highlighted cognitive and social psychological factors and the importance of rhetoric in scientific decision making. In reaction, critics questioned whether there have been any genuinely Kuhnian revolutions, accusing Kuhn of debunking modern science by portraying science as subjective, irrational, and relativistic. Kuhn replied that he was not a relativist, that he was attempting to develop a new account of scientific cognition and rationality, and that he was in effect trying to instigate a revolution of his own at the level of metascience and even general epistemology. Virtually no expert fully accepts Kuhn’s model of science, but there is general agreement that he posed some serious problems, including the problem of new theories: How can it be rational for scientists to reject a highly developed and accomplished theory or research program in favor of a radical and undeveloped new approach? Kuhn’s work stimulated a number of later developments in philosophy and in social studies of science more generally.

KUHN'S EDUCATION: WITTGENSTEIN, PEDAGOGY, AND THE ROAD TOSTRUCTURE

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOEL ISAAC
Keyword(s):  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Theory Choice ◽  
Normal Science ◽  
Theory Of Science ◽  
Philosophical Position ◽  
The Road ◽  
Scientific Revolutions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Structure Of Scientific Revolutions ◽  
Meaning Change

Among the topics discussed in Thomas Kuhn'sThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions, those of education, training, and pedagogy are apt to seem the least compelling. Certainly, the earliest debates aboutStructurefocused on other, more controversial, matters: incommensurability, meaning change, the rationality of theory choice, normal science—the list goes on. Over the past two decades, however, a growing concern among historians and sociologists of science with the nature of scientific apprenticeship has stimulated greater appreciation of the importance of questions of teaching and learning to the philosophical position sketched inStructure. This paper seeks to develop further our understanding of these issues as they bear on Kuhn's theory of science.

scholarly journals Interpreting the History of Evolutionary Biology through a Kuhnian Prism: Sense or Nonsense?

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Koen B. Tanghe ◽  
Lieven Pauwels ◽  
Alexis De Tiège ◽  
Johan Braeckman
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Developmental Model ◽  
Evolutionary Synthesis ◽  
Extended Evolutionary Synthesis ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Scientific Revolutions ◽  
Structure Of Scientific Revolutions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Evolutionary Synthesis

Traditionally, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is largely identified with his analysis of the structure of scientific revolutions. Here, we contribute to a minority tradition in the Kuhn literature by interpreting the history of evolutionary biology through the prism of the entire historical developmental model of sciences that he elaborates in The Structure. This research not only reveals a certain match between this model and the history of evolutionary biology but, more importantly, also sheds new light on several episodes in that history, and particularly on the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the construction of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the chronic discontent with it, and the latest expression of that discontent, called the extended evolutionary synthesis. Lastly, we also explain why this kind of analysis hasn’t been done before.

How Can the Living Ties be Severed in the Field of Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 108-129
Author(s):  
Irina Kitova
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Scientific Revolutions ◽  
Film Distribution ◽  
Structure Of Scientific Revolutions ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Film Education ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Functions ◽  
The Ideal

In this paper we will try to apply Kuhn’s views on the structure of scientific revolutions in the field of culture and film art. We will try to find to what extent we can apply or reject such understandings of the field of culture, even if only in the strictly national dimensions of a cultural phenomenon. By tracking the development of the film art and industry through the changes they cause or the cultural functions they perform, we can verify whether and to what extent the ideal in science is comparable to the ideal in the culture and the arts. We will also be looking for anomalies, non-functional paradigms and paradoxes, which could influence not only the development of culture in national context, but also the construction of the essential matter of the cultural field as a unique global phenomenon, the result of human activity, ideas and creativity.Through the history of building the first movie theater “Modern Theater” in Bulgaria, in 1908, the beginning and evolution of cinema as an art, a national cine-ma industry, film networks and film distribution, film studies and film education will trace the genesis of a new layer in the field of the Bulgarian national culture and the preconditions for its sustainability, significance and vitality.

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