Abstract
The interpretive plasticity of Kuhn’s philosophical work has been reinforced by readings informed by other philosophical, historiographic or sociological projects. This paper highlights several aspects of Kuhn’s work that have been neglected by such readings. First, Kuhn’s early contribution to several subsequent philosophical developments has been unduly neglected. Kuhn’s postscript discussion of “exemplars” should be recognized as one of the earliest versions of a conception of theories as “mediating models.” Kuhn’s account of experimental practice has also been obscured by readings that assimilate his views to Quinean holism. Second, three distinctive Kuhnian themes have been insufficiently recognized. Kuhn’s challenge to received philosophical views has been domesticated by reading him as offering an alternative conception of scientific knowledge. Kuhn is better understood as rejecting knowledge-centric accounts altogether, in favor of understanding the practice of research. Kuhn’s conception of that activity, as conceptual “articulation,” has accordingly also not been given its due. Finally, Kuhn’s career-long insistence on the mutual accountability of philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind and language calls attention to the extent to which these fields have now drifted apart.
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Notes
None of these texts cites or indexes Kuhn.
Hence, the infamous quotation about Lavoisier, for which commentators have usually given insufficient emphasis or comprehension to the verb: “after discovering oxygen, Lavoisier worked in a different world” (1970, 118, my emphasis).
The classic introduction of this phrase was in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind: “in characterizing an episode or a state as one that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says” (1997, 76).
Oreskes and Conway 2010 show how the strategic political uses of manufactured “controversy” have been integral to conservative resistance to environmental and health regulations in the United States for the past four decades. Similar strategies have also informed the post-1960 s renewal of efforts to restrict the teaching of evolutionary biology in American public schools.
The problem with lowest-common-denominator formulations, e.g., that species evolve in part by natural selection over a multi-billion year history of the earth or that there has been significant and growing anthropogenic climate change since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, is not that they are false, but that they understate the sophisticated and detailed articulation of scientific understanding in these domains, even though more specific formulations would yield dissent on details within a common space of scientific reasoning.
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Rouse, J. Recovering Thomas Kuhn. Topoi 32, 59–64 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-012-9143-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-012-9143-x