Product Description
Dark green leather bound edition (Second Edition, Enlarged)published as part of The Masterpieces of Science series by New American Library in 1986. ... Read more

Product Description
the Copernican Revolution, Planetary Astronomy in Development of Western Thought by Thomas S. Kuhn ... Read more

Product Description
Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is probably the best-known and most influential historian and philosopher of science of the last 25 years, and has become something of a cultural icon. His concepts of paradigm, paradigm change and incommensurability have changed our thinking about science. This volume offers an introduction to Kuhn's life and work and considers the implications of his work for philosophy, cognitive psychology, social studies of science and feminism. More than a retrospective on Kuhn, the book explores future developments of cognitive and information services along Kuhnian lines. Outside of philosophy the volume is of interest to professionals and students in cognitive science, history of science, science studies and cultural studies.Thomas Nickles is Professor of Philosophy and Chair at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is editor of Scientific Discovery, Logic, and Rationality and Scientific Discovery: Case Studies (both Reidel, 1980). Nickles is co-editor of PSA 1982 (The Philosophy of Science Association Proceedings). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Some comments on Kuhn's & also Polanyi's ideas
Writers like Kuhn and Polanyi's subjectivistic approach to science are still popular in some circles, mostly because of the west's fascination with individual consciousness and the existential and phenomenological approaches to reality that grew out of that. While this is understandable historically I believe that this approach is still invalid, so I thought I'd say a little about that. But that will involve my discussing some basic philosophical history, so I hope you don't mind if I wax a little nerdy there.

Basically, the most important concept in epistemology is the split between the philosophies of idealism and empiricism. Idealists believe that ideas about the external world are innate. Kant was the last major philosopher to articulate the classical position on this, and his influence is still being felt by contemporary neo-Kantian theories and philosophers. For example, Kant mantained that the ideas of space and time were so fundamental that they had to be built-in, innate ideas. He argued that the test of this is that if one can't imagine a universe without a certain idea, then that idea couldn't have come from external reality. While this is an interesting contention, and there is some support for it (perceptual psychologist Eleanor Gibson showed that even at 1 year of age babies can perceive depth and space very well, in her famous "visual cliff" experiments), it is unlikely that there are truly innate ideas, although there are probably innate abilities like Kant suggested, since as he pointed out, in order for the mind to be actively involved in organizing and structuring the data of the senses, this could not occur unless there were corresponding mental capabilities and constucts to match.

But getting back to the philosophy definitions, as many people know, Locke, Hume, and most of the British philosophers were empiricists; they believed that ideas come from sense data and from external reality. This philosophical split between idealism and empiricism in thinking goes all the way back to Aristotle and Plato, so if you understand what it was about, you basically understand what most of western philosophy was about since then. The one exception here is the British philosopher Berkeley, who was an extreme subjectivist, and his philosophy is known as solipsism. He actually thought that the external world only existed because we perceived it, making it an extreme form of idealism. He did this by arguing that since we ultimately only know our own minds and its consciousness and internal perceptions, that there is no real way to prove that an objective, external reality even exists. While there is some truth to this, it's obviously an extreme position, and as result of recent research over the last 30 years in the neurophysiology and biophysics of sensation and perception, as in the case of David Marr's mathematical and theoretical work and his followers, we know now just how rigorous and analytical the process of perceiving external reality actually is.

Hence, there is very little reason anymore to insist on the fundamental subjectivity of perception in the Kantian sense. It is true that there are visual illusions at the higher levels of sensory perception, but those are now regarded as special cases, and they are being shown to be explainable in terms of mathematical visual field- distortion theories of these mechanisms that can be quantified just like the basic sensory processes.

But getting back to what I was saying before, Kant's view is still popular in some circles, and actually, he was right about certain things, such as the mind having certain built-in capabilities to understand reality, as I mentioned above in the case of idealism. The linguist, Noam Chomsky, and his ideas about an innate language capability are an example of this neo-Kantian approach, actually, which has been supported by developmental studies and by studies of feral children in regard to a critical period between 6 and 8 years of age, which is required for language developement.

However, most scientists and philosophers since the early 20th century are probably either Logical Positivists or Critical Naturalists rather than Idealists or neo-Kantians in the strict sense. The problem with neo-Kantianism is that a systematic ghost of an illusion pervades even the finest specimens of this theory, since there is no strong connection to external reality anymore. Both Critical Naturalism and Logical Positivism were strongly influenced by scientific theories about reality, and Logical Positivism is really just the philosophy and analysis of scientific method and of the logic of scientific hypothesis and theories rather than traditional philosophy in the usual sense. Some of the famous Logical Positivists were people like Rudolf Carnap, A.J. Ayer, and Reichenbach, whose names many people know. Critical Naturalism does get more into traditional philosophical topics like metaphysics and ontology but again, they tend to take their ideas about reality from what science has discovered in quantum theory and cosmology and what that implies as far as figuring out the metaphysics and ontology of the real world.

Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell were two famous 20th century philosophers who were examples of the Critical Naturalism school, and both of them were mathematicians as well as philosophers. Whitehead was Russell's math professor, and in fact, they both wrote a famous work on mathematical logic, The Principia Mathematica, in which they show that the basic mathematical operations can be derived from logic.

Since we're on the subject, I thought I'd make several comments specifically on Kuhn's theory as set forth in his famous book, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's idea qualifies as a psychohistorical explanation of the nature of scientific progress, because scientists must have already made a cognitive shift to a new mindset before acceptance of the new theory can occur.

Other people have commented on similar ideas in the works of Feyerabend, Popper, and Polanyi, so I won't repeat any of that here. What I will say, however, is that this theory, while interesting, makes as little, or as much sense, itself, as the irrational science it purports to explain.

First, Kuhn's explanation of the process seems plausible psychologically but in fact is not supported by the psychological literature itself. People change deeply held convictions and ideas not because of an external paradigm shift, but because they become convinced internally that the new idea is superior to the old. Why? Because it explains the facts better, makes more powerful predictions, or is simpler. In other words, it is a fairly logical, reasonable process. This should surprise no-one but Kuhn.

Second, Kuhn's theory ignores the innumerable scientific hypotheses, theories, and advances that displaced earlier explanations with very little or no resistance.

Third, Kuhn misinterprets the initial resistance to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The real problem with the acceptance of this theory is that when it made its debut (especially in the case of Einstein's General Theory), few physicists themselves could even understand the mathematics and physics involved. Ignorance should not be confused with scientific irrationalism or just stubborn refusal to accept the truth.

Well, I hope you didn't mind my little philosophy digression, but I thought I'd make a few comments about the evolution of these ideas since Kuhn and Polanyi's ideas are best understood in the context of the development of philosophical ideas over the last several centuries. ... Read more

Product Description
Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) transformed the philosophy of science. His seminal 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, sold over one million copies and was translated into more than a dozen languages. It introduced the term "paradigm shift" into the vernacular and remains a fundamental text in the study of the history and philosophy of science. This introduction to Kuhn's ideas situates The Structure of Scientific Revolutions within the development of his thought over time.

Alexander Bird explains Kuhn's central distinction between normal and revolutionary science and then examines in detail the role played by the key notion of a paradigm in his account of radical scientific change. The book considers Kuhn's claim that the scientist's world changes when paradigms change and relates this thought to his views on perception, incommensurability, and meaning.

The author engages with the main criticisms of Kuhn's philosophy. Examining Kuhn's thought in relation to its historical context as well as other more recent philosophies of science, Alexander Bird argues that Kuhn's thinking betrays a residual commitment to many theses characteristic of the empiricists he set out to challenge. His book concludes by looking at Kuhn's influence on the history and philosophy of science and asks where the field may be heading in the wake of Kuhn's ideas.

Accessible to those with little formal philosophy training, this is an assured and engaging read for anyone interested in Kuhn's pivotal ideas. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Somewhat out of touch
Bird begins by claiming in the preface that Kuhn was not really a philosopher, and then devotes the rest of the book to amending Kuhn's wishy-washy layman's theories with the self-important rigour and precision of modern analytic philosophy. This approach is not without its merits but it also spirals inwards quite frequently and forgets that Kuhn's theories are about science after all. I will complain about some results of this lack of perspective.

Bird claims that "some revolutions can be conservative accumulations of new but significant discoveries and theories. Such revolutions are not explicable in terms of one paradigm failing, generating a crisis and then being replaced by a competitor. These revolutions may just be blossoming of normal science. ... The case of the discovery of the structure of DNA illustrates this. ... [This] discovery that many regard as the most important of the century simply does not fit Kuhn's description of scientific development---it originated in no crisis and required little or no revision of existing paradigms even though it brought into existence major new fields of research." (pp. 60, 62). But Bird provides no evidence that this discovery was the result of normal science in Kuhn's sense. The fact that it "required little or no revision of existing paradigms" suggests on the contrary that it was the result of pre-paradigmatic research rather than normal science. That Bird fails to recognise this elementary distinction is ironic since he has just spent an entire chapter rambling about the difference between a "revolution_K" (meaning a revolution in Kuhn's sense) and a revolution in the common sense; if only he had taken the time to give "normal_K" science its own flashy subscript notation too then maybe he would not have confused it with "normal" science.

In the chapter on "Perception and world change," Bird's main thesis is that "the effect of theoretical belief on perceptual experience is weak and marginal" (p. 122). On this basis he seems to draw the conclusion that Kuhn's claims regarding theory-ladenness of observation are relatively harmless (cf. pp. 147-148, 155, 202). But Bird's entire discussion concerns only direct sensory perception, while Kuhn also emphasised theory-ladenness of scientific data that is not directly perceptual ("The data themselves had changed"; Structure, p. 134). By completely ignoring this latter aspect of theory-ladenness Bird misrepresents Kuhn and omits an important factor from his later discussions of incommensurability and relativism.

My final quarrel is with Bird's attempted refutation of incommensurability, in particular concerning Kuhn's claim that Newtonian mechanics is not a limiting case of Einsteinian mechanics since, e.g., Newtonian mass differs from Einstenian mass.

The following is Bird's conclusion on the matter. "To summarize, Kuhn assumes that laws fix intensional meaning and thereby fix, in a strict manner, extension and reference. If it is further assumed that all laws play a part [which is Kuhn's view, according to Bird] then it follows that if the term in question refers, then the laws must be true [but 'Newton's laws are not all true' according to Bird; p. 174]; correspondingly if one or more of the laws fails to be true then there is no reference, in which case incommensurability of reference cannot arise. ... Consequently his argument fails to establish incommensurability due to shifts in reference." (p. 176)

One wonders what Bird means when he says that according to Kuhn "laws fix meaning." Surely he does not have in mind only (what is commonly called) Newton's laws, for that would invalidate his premiss since it would be a gross misrepresentation of Kuhn. As Bird notes elsewhere, "[Kuhn] accepted the empiricist view that scientific terms get their meanings by some sort of implicit definition from the bulk (or even all) of the theory in which they play a part" (p. 206). "Some sort of implicit definition" is certainly very different from "fixed by three or four laws." (Incidentally, if Bird really did mean Newton's laws here then it is far from obvious that "Newton's laws are not all true" since one can argue that Newton's laws are essentially tautological without auxiliary assumptions (cf. e.g. Poincare), which would preclude Bird's conclusion.)

So presumably the "laws" Bird is speaking of comprise the entire Newtonian theory with all its auxiliary assumptions. But then the "it follows"-inference in the above quotation is very questionable. Bird's proof of this step goes as follows. Take all of Newton's laws and replace "mass" everywhere by x. "Now the laws taken together will form a complex predicate, which we may abbreviate L(x), so the intension of 'N-mass' [i.e. Newtonian mass] may be characterized as: 'the property x such that L(x)'" (p. 173). So if Newtonian mass has a reference then it follows that L(N-mass), which is Newton's laws, is true. "Hence Kuhn's account leads to the conclusion that it is knowable a priori that if his, Kuhn's, assumptions are true, then Newton's laws are true" (p. 173). But Bird gives no justification for the assumption that the laws in question can be reduced to a list of propositional statements from which the concept of mass can be straightforwardly detached. It seems far from obvious to me how this assumption is to be reconciled with Kuhn's notion of mass defined through "some sort of implicit definition" based on a mishmash of interdependent assumptions regarding force, space, time, etc.

Kuhn Made Safe for Philosophers
This book was recently discussed alongside Fuller's much more interesting "Thomas Kuhn" and Kuhn's own "The Road since Structure" in the New York Times as part of the current Kuhn-mania (July 21, 2001). Bird is a good textbook writer, and the book succeeds in domesticating Kuhn's intellectual project for mainstream, rather unimaginative philosophers. Without any disrespect intended, is there really much to be gained by trying to show why Kuhn was really an "empiricist" and not the "naturalist" that he should have been (according to Bird) -- especially if in the next breath you're also claiming that Kuhn wasn't really a philosopher, when it got down to it (which Bird claims)? I know there are philosophers who are used to this way of doing business, but it leaves the reader with a rather impoverished, though adequate, view of Kuhn. ... Read more

Product Description
Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions became the most widely read book about science in the twentieth century. His terms 'paradigm' and 'scientific revolution' entered everyday speech, but they remain controversial. In the second half of the twentieth century, the new field of cognitive science combined empirical psychology, computer science, and neuroscience.In this book, the recent theories of concepts developed by cognitive scientists are used to evaluate and extend Kuhn's most influential ideas. Based on case studies of the Copernican revolution, the discovery of nuclear fission, and an elaboration of Kuhn's famous 'ducks and geese' example of concept learning, the volume offers new accounts of the nature of normal and revolutionary science, the function of anomalies, and the nature of incommensurability. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An important advance in the historically-based philosophy of science
Peter Barker and his colleagues Hanne Andersen and Xiang Chen have been working for more than a dozen years to reconsider, reframe and extend the concepts developed by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.This book presents a synthesis of their thought in a concise, rigorous, and highly readable volume.Most impressively, the authors provide an empirical grounding for the Kuhnian notions of scientific revolution, normal science, the role of anomalies and the key concept of incommensurability.They reinterpret the course of the Copernican Revolution, persuasively solving many of the problems that Kuhn could not.They provide an account of "paradigm shift" in the discovery of nuclear fission.They provide a brief account of the implications of their thought for Science and Technology Studies, and the sociology, history and philosophy of science.They provide a persuasive argument for how their approach avoids the perils of strong programs in realism and relativism.

If this description already makes sense to you, then you should read this book.If it sounds like jargon or gobbledygook, then I can tell you that the book is lucid and accessible, with many illustrations and examples.It provides an important answer to the questions, "What is scientific knowledge, and how does it change?"It should be on the reading list for any introductory course in the philosophy of science, and should be a challenging but good read for anyone who might consider taking such a course. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Some comments & comparisons
Writers like Kuhn and Polanyi's subjectivistic approach to science are still popular in some circles, mostly because of the west's fascination with individual consciousness and the existential and phenomenological approaches to reality that grew out of that. While this is understandable historically I believe that this approach is still invalid, so I thought I'd say a little about that. But that will involve my discussing some basic philosophical history, so I hope you don't mind if I wax a little nerdy there.

Basically, the most important concept in epistemology is the split between the philosophies of idealism and empiricism. Idealists believe that ideas about the external world are innate. Kant was the last major philosopher to articulate the classical position on this, and his influence is still being felt by contemporary neo-Kantian theories and philosophers. For example, Kant mantained that the ideas of space and time were so fundamental that they had to be built-in, innate ideas. He argued that the test of this is that if one can't imagine a universe without a certain idea, then that idea couldn't have come from external reality. While this is an interesting contention, and there is some support for it (perceptual psychologist Eleanor Gibson showed that even at 1 year of age babies can perceive depth and space very well, in her famous "visual cliff" experiments), it is unlikely that there are truly innate ideas, although there are probably innate abilities like Kant suggested, since as he pointed out, in order for the mind to be actively involved in organizing and structuring the data of the senses, this could not occur unless there were corresponding mental capabilities and constucts to match.

But getting back to the philosophy definitions, as many people know, Locke, Hume, and most of the British philosophers were empiricists; they believed that ideas come from sense data and from external reality. This philosophical split between idealism and empiricism in thinking goes all the way back to Aristotle and Plato, so if you understand what it was about, you basically understand what most of western philosophy was about since then. The one exception here is the British philosopher Berkeley, who was an extreme subjectivist, and his philosophy is known as solipsism. He actually thought that the external world only existed because we perceived it, making it an extreme form of idealism. He did this by arguing that since we ultimately only know our own minds and its consciousness and internal perceptions, that there is no real way to prove that an objective, external reality even exists. While there is some truth to this, it's obviously an extreme position, and as result of recent research over the last 30 years in the neurophysiology and biophysics of sensation and perception, as in the case of David Marr's mathematical and theoretical work and his followers, we know now just how rigorous and analytical the process of perceiving external reality actually is.

Hence, there is very little reason anymore to insist on the fundamental subjectivity of perception in the Kantian sense. It is true that there are visual illusions at the higher levels of sensory perception, but those are now regarded as special cases, and they are being shown to be explainable in terms of mathematical visual field- distortion theories of these mechanisms that can be quantified just like the basic sensory processes.

But getting back to what I was saying before, Kant's view is still popular in some circles, and actually, he was right about certain things, such as the mind having certain built-in capabilities to understand reality, as I mentioned above in the case of idealism. The linguist, Noam Chomsky, and his ideas about an innate language capability are an example of this neo-Kantian approach, actually, which has been supported by developmental studies and by studies of feral children in regard to a critical period between 6 and 8 years of age, which is required for language developement.

However, most scientists and philosophers since the early 20th century are probably either Logical Positivists or Critical Naturalists rather than Idealists or neo-Kantians in the strict sense. The problem with neo-Kantianism is that a systematic ghost of an illusion pervades even the finest specimens of this theory, since there is no strong connection to external reality anymore. Both Critical Naturalism and Logical Positivism were strongly influenced by scientific theories about reality, and Logical Positivism is really just the philosophy and analysis of scientific method and of the logic of scientific hypothesis and theories rather than traditional philosophy in the usual sense. Some of the famous Logical Positivists were people like Rudolf Carnap, A.J. Ayer, and Reichenbach, whose names many people know. Critical Naturalism does get more into traditional philosophical topics like metaphysics and ontology but again, they tend to take their ideas about reality from what science has discovered in quantum theory and cosmology and what that implies as far as figuring out the metaphysics and ontology of the real world.

Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell were two famous 20th century philosophers who were examples of the Critical Naturalism school, and both of them were mathematicians as well as philosophers. Whitehead was Russell's math professor, and in fact, they both wrote a famous work on mathematical logic, The Principia Mathematica, in which they show that the basic mathematical operations can be derived from logic.

Since we're on the subject, I thought I'd make several comments specifically on Kuhn's theory as set forth in his famous book, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's idea qualifies as a psychohistorical explanation of the nature of scientific progress, because scientists must have already made a cognitive shift to a new mindset before acceptance of the new theory can occur.

Other people have commented on similar ideas in the works of Feyerabend, Popper, and Polanyi, so I won't repeat any of that here. What I will say, however, is that this theory, while interesting, makes as little, or as much sense, itself, as the irrational science it purports to explain.

First, Kuhn's explanation of the process seems plausible psychologically but in fact is not supported by the psychological literature itself. People change deeply held convictions and ideas not because of an external paradigm shift, but because they become convinced internally that the new idea is superior to the old. Why? Because it explains the facts better, makes more powerful predictions, or is simpler. In other words, it is a fairly logical, reasonable process. This should surprise no-one but Kuhn.

Second, Kuhn's theory ignores the innumerable scientific hypotheses, theories, and advances that displaced earlier explanations with very little or no resistance.

Third, Kuhn misinterprets the initial resistance to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The real problem with the acceptance of this theory is that when it made its debut (especially in the case of Einstein's General Theory), few physicists themselves could even understand the mathematics and physics involved. Ignorance should not be confused with scientific irrationalism or just stubborn refusal to accept the truth.

Well, I hope you didn't mind my little philosophy digression, but I thought I'd make a few comments about the evolution of these ideas since Kuhn and Polanyi's ideas are best understood in the context of the development of philosophical ideas over the last several centuries.

A failed benevolent interpretation of Kuhn
As a graduate student in Notre Dame's school of philosophy during the years that the Reverend McMullin was philosophy department chairman, I found "Kuhn" was an unwelcome four-letter word.But Kuhn became a succes de scandale in philosophy.This book's "Introduction" was written in 1980 by Gutting, a Notre Dame philosophy department faculty member and editor of this book.Notre Dame was seeking acceptance in the philosophy of science profession.I see this book as their school's belated but unsuccessful attempt at reconciliation with Kuhn.

Kuhn's philosophy is open to serious criticism.But Gutting wrote a benevolent review and interpretation.Gutting sees in Kuhn's thesis of paradigm what Gutting calls a "super-theory".The super-theory strategically includes all that is in a paradigm over and above the articulate theory. Methodological rules and theory-neutral observations do not resolve competition between paradigms; it is the scientific community's judgment that is the ultimate locus of science's rational authority.Gutting says this is Kuhn's new concept of rationality, and Gutting accuses criticizing philosophers such as Scheffler of distorting Kuhn's views by failing to understand them and by using positivist criteria such as rules.

Not infrequently in the history of science scientists have exercised their sovereignty by ignoring or rejecting the rules formulated by philosophers.This is what happened when both Einstein and Heisenberg repudiated the then-prevailing positivism.Yet however often philosophers have been humbled in such manner by scientists, philosophers cannot simply abandon their efforts to characterize the practices and articulate the criteria responsible for the conspicuous successes of science, any more than physicists can simply abandon formulating theories.Philosophers attempt to characterize the new philosophy in the successful practice of science.This is what the contemporary pragmatists have done in response to Heisenberg's philosophizing on the modern quantum theory.

Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1961) is a variation on the contemporary pragmatism.What Quine had called semantical relativism and ontological relativity Kuhn extrapolated into complete semantical and ontological incommensurability, so that Quine's empirical underdetermination became empirical undecidability.Kuhn's unfortunate novelty was to introduce sociological conformism as the source of decidability with no criterion for scientists' decisions.

Later in Criticism and Growth of Knowledge (1971) Kuhn backpedaled to propose "partial incommensurability" to escape the undecidability in his original thesis.But philosophers demanded a philosophy of language that could support Kuhn's claims - which could show how partial incommensurability is possible and thus how science is empirically decidable.And these demanding philosophers were not reactionary positivists, as Gutting would have his readers believe.

A philosophy of language is necessary even if sociology has some effect in deciding the distribution of truth-values to form the scientific community's web of beliefs.The scientific community's consensus judgment is not the ultimate locus of science's rational authority, because the real world as described by the web of beliefs has occasioned falsification of some of the beliefs, so that the consensus judgment can be and has been found to be wrong.

Kuhn eventually recognized his need to get beyond sociology.In his autobiographical discussion in Road Since Structure (2000) Kuhn relates that Hesse had told him that his problem is that he has got to say how science is empirical, i.e. what difference observation makes.Kuhn comments that Hesse was right and that he had told her that he had not seen his work that way (p. 186).

By 1971 Kuhn had substituted linguistically expressed theory for his idea of paradigm, thus discarding what Gutting calls "super-theory."But Kuhn's Road Since Structure chronicles his unsuccessful struggles to develop a philosophy of language adequate to show how science is empirical.Gutting, however, seems not even to have seen the problem.

The papers in this book are reprints of previously published articles from the 1970's.The best this book has to offer is a convenient secondary literature reflecting what might be called the anti-analytical "Kuhn era", which predates the current return to analytical-linguistic philosophy in today's era of computational philosophy of science - where rules are the instructions in artificial-intelligence computer discovery systems.

For more about Kuhn's philosophy Google my book titled History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science at my web site philsci with free downloads.See especially Book VI.

Thomas J. Hickey
... Read more

Product Description
Presenting a critical history of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century, focusing on the transition from logical positivism in its first half to the 'new philosophy of science' in its second, Stefano Gattei examines the influence of several key figures, but the main focus of the book are Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper.Kuhn as the central figure of the new philosophy of science, and Popper as a key philosopher of the time who stands outside both traditions. Gattei makes two important claims about the development of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century; that Kuhn is much closer to positivism than many have supposed, failing to solve the crisis of neopostivism, and that Popper, in responding to the deeper crisis of foundationalism that spans the whole of the Western philosophical tradition, ultimately shows what is untenable in Kuhn's view.Gattei has written a very detailed and fine grained, yet accessible discussion making exceptionally interesting use of archive materials. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A tribute to the stupidity of modern philosophy of science
This stupid book embodies the doctrinal idiocy of modern analytic philosophy of science. The book appears to be essentially Gattei's PhD thesis (indeed, it consists almost entirely of highly unimaginative, dissertation-style literature review); and, since Gattei is obviously intellectually spineless, the book reveals the doctrinal imprint in its purest form. The book's stupid thesis is that "the implicit presuppositions and the stated principles of Kuhn's philosophy are not very different from those of the logical positivists or logical empiricists he was determined to reject" (p. x). The notion that Kuhn was "determined to reject" logical positivism is of course utterly ridiculous. Two assumptions make such nonsense appear sensible to people like Gattei and Alexander Bird (his PhD advisor, who has written on the same topic). Firstly, that logical positivism is the alpha and the omega of philosophy of science, and that everyone must be "determined" to define his opinion in relation to it. Secondly, that the philosophy of science is a pathetic ping-pong game between philosophical isms. Because of these doctrinal assumptions, it never occurs to these people that someone might actually do philosophy of science by thinking about actual science and pursuing the interesting questions that arise, rather than by rummaging through the hottest post-positivist journals in search of some miniscule crevice that no one has exploited yet. ... Read more

Product Description
Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which examines paradigm theory as it relates to philosophy of science, is among the most widely read--and debated--books in the history and philosophy of science. In Paradigms Explained, the author examines both the contributions and limitations of Kuhn's work on paradigm theory. Von Dietze's accessible writing style and thought-provoking exploration of Kuhn's impact on scientific, philosophical, and social thought engage the reader and offer new insights into the problematic yet influential ideas of one of the most prominent philosophers of science. ... Read more

Product Description
Thomas Kuhn's shadow hangs over almost every field of intellectual inquiry. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has become a modern classic. His influence on philosophy, social science, historiography, feminism, theology, and (of course) the natural sciences themselves is unparalleled. His epoch-making concepts of 'new paradigm' and 'scientific revolution' make him probably the most influential scholar of the twentieth century.


Sharrock and Read take the reader through Kuhn's work in a careful and accessible way, emphasizing Kuhn's detailed studies of the history of science, which often assist the understanding of his more abstract philosophical work. These historical studies provide vital insight into what Kuhn was actually trying to achieve in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: an endeavour far less extreme than either his 'foes' or his 'fans' claim. In the book's second half, Sharrock and Read provide excellent explications, defences and, where appropriate, criticisms of Kuhn's central concept of 'incommensurability', and tackle head on the crucial issue of whether Kuhn's insights concerning the natural sciences can be extrapolated to other disciplines, such as the social sciences.


This is the first comprehensive introduction to the work of Kuhn and it will be of particular interest to students and scholars in philosophy, theory of science, management science and anthropology. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Kuhn was asking for it!
Kuhn's description of learning a paradigm in his 'Postscript -1969' (Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2nd edition 1970) was seized upon by Barnes as the best example of the social nature of scientific knowledge. How Kuhn could have written Structure without realising the social interpretation Barnes was to apply is difficult to understand when one re-reads Structure. ... Read more