The Post-Postmodern Turn: Challenging the Application of Kuhn's Model

The point of departure for this article is the much-debated death of postmodernism, heralded by influential experts on the subject such as Linda Hutcheon or Ihab Hassan at the beginning of the new millennium. Although the academic community as a whole has not agreed with this fact, there was an intense debate during the first years of the twenty-first century that was evidence of a change of attitude towards this cultural phase. With this in mind, the aim of this study is to provide a theoretical framework for the change in order to understand its nature. Analysing the theories developed by Thomas S. Kuhn on paradigm shifts in the field of science and applying them to the context of critical theory at the beginning of the millennium serves to challenge the very idea of postmodernism as a paradigm in the terms developed in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

What’s Forgotten About The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?

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.

8. Against universalism

‘Against universalism’ explores the myriad challenges to universalism—in philosophy, social and political theory, and the arts—during the late twentieth century. It opens with a new view of 1960s radicalism, showing how its various quests for liberation radiated out into all arenas of American thought. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) helped pave the way for the fire and fury of postmodernism, though many of the antiessentialist ideas of postmodernism were already present in early twentieth-century was rooting in dramatic transformations of thought. The 1980s and 1990s gave rise to identity politics and the culture wars, further challenging the notion of unified American ideals and identity.

Individuals, Communities, and Groups in Thomas Kuhn’s Model of Scientific Development

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn resorts to concepts from several disciplines in order to describe the general patterns of scientific development. This blend of disciplines can be explained in part by Kuhn's intellectual path, from physics to history and then to philosophy of science; but it also points to a deeper methodological problem, which is the question of what is the real unity of analysis in his model of science. The primary intention of this article is, thus, to give a solution to this difficulty. The answer, I believe, rests on identifying three fundamental units present in Kuhn's theory of scientific development. They are, respectively, the individual, responsible for producing evidence, spreading information, and choosing theories; the community, a set of scientists investigating a series of phenomena; and the groups, individuals with similar behavior but with looser institutional or social ties — a usually neglected category in Kuhnian literature, but equally fundamental for the final outcome of scientific debates. After investigating these categories in detail, I propose a way of integrating them into a general model for explaining the resolution of scientific controversies. Finally, I try to resolve the apparent conflict among disciplinary vocabularies by offering an account of the function of sociological, psychological, and epistemological concepts for describing controversies, and some of the methodologies appropriate for each of these tasks.

O problema dos paradigmas nas práticas jornalísticas

O jornalismo é uma atividade cujos estudiosos apontam possuir os próprios paradigmas. Mas existe ciência nessas afirmações? Este artigo tem como objetivo traçar um percurso teórico-histórico sobre o conceito de paradigma. Partimos da popularização do termo com a publicação da obra A Estrutura das Revoluções Científicas (1998), do físico estadunidense Thomas Kuhn. Por meio de uma revisão bibliográfica, mostramos como o conceito foi problematizado e remodelado no âmbito das ciências sociais e, em especial, pelos estudiosos do jornalismo, entre eles Jean Charron e Jean De Bonville, que criaram a teoria dos paradigmas do jornalismo. Nossa conclusão aponta para a necessidade da apropriação do termo pelos estudiosos do jornalismo a fim de dar legitimidade acadêmica a essa prática social.Palavras-chave: Thomas Kuhn; paradigmas do jornalismo; estudos de jornalismo; Jean Charron; Jean De Bonville.The problem of paradigms in journalistic practicesAbstractJournalism is an activity whose scholars point to having its own paradigms. But is there science in these claims? This article aims to outline a theoretical-historical path about the concept of paradigm. We started with the popularization of the term with the publication of the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1998), by the American physicist Thomas Kuhn. Through a bibliographic review, we show how the concept was problematized and remodeled in the scope of social sciences and, in particular, by scholars of journalism, among them Jean Charron and Jean De Bonville, who created the theory of journalism paradigms. Our conclusion points to the need for the appropriation of the term by scholars of journalism in order to give academic legitimacy to this social practice. Keywords: Thomas Kuhn; paradigms of journalism; Journalism Studies; Jean Charron; Jean De Bonville.

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

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.

ANALYSIS OF PARADIGM SHIFT AND IRRATIONALITY IN THOMAS KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

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.

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

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.

On Scientific and Technological Paradigms Competitions in Ideological Control in Science Conditions

Modern science is, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his fundamental work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a science that develops in stages: “scientific revolution” – “nor­mal science” – “scientific revolution”. During periods of normal functioning of science, the rules of testing and testing show established and perceived without reflection para­digms, but in the case of technical disciplines, this rule does not work, since technical paradigms do not change according to the same rules as other scientific paradigms. To change technical paradigms, you only need to accept them by the expert community – you also need to accept them by technical consumers. The article discusses the difficul­ties of defining the concepts of “technology” and “technical knowledge” as knowledge about artifacts, their use and the consequences of their use (Bernhard Irrgang). On two examples of the control of technical paradigms in two totalitarian regimes of the twenti­eth century (Lysenkoism, or Lysenkovshchina and “Aryan physics”), the role of para­digms in the situation of ideological control is presented. In these cases, we used at­tempts to “correct” genetics and quantum physics (more precisely, to completely abandon it), respectively. Of course, this control brought biology in the Soviet Union and physics in Nazi Germany to the brink of disaster. In this article, with the help of Gisle Solbu's theory of epi-knowing (knowledge at the general educational level), we propose solutions to the problem of purposeful ideological interference in the scientific and ideo­logical adjustments of not only scientific paradigms, but also scientific paradigms.