I re-examine Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions. I argue that the sorts of events Kuhn regards as scientific revolutions are a diverse lot, differing in significant ways. But, I also argue that Kuhn does provide us with a principled way to distinguish revolutionary changes from non-revolutionary changes in science. Scientific revolutions are those changes in science that (1) involve taxonomic changes, (2) are precipitated by disappointment with existing practices, and (3) cannot be resolved by appealing to shared standards. I argue (...) that an important and often overlooked dimension of the Kuhnian account of scientific change is the shift in focus from theories to research communities. Failing to make this shift in perspective might lead one to think that when individual scientists change theories a scientific revolution has occurred. But, according to Kuhn, it is research communities that undergo revolutionary changes, not individual scientists. I show that the change in early modern astronomy is aptly characterized as a Kuhnian revolution. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn described the progress of science as comprising occasional paradigm shifts separated by interludes of ‘normal science’. The paradigm that has held sway since the inception of molecular biology is that genes (mainly) encode proteins. In parallel, theoreticians posited that mutation is random, inferred that most of the genome in complex organisms is non‐functional, and asserted that somatic information is not communicated to the germline. However, many anomalies appeared, particularly in plants and animals: the strange genetic phenomena of paramutation (...) and transvection; introns; repetitive sequences; a complex epigenome; lack of scaling of (protein‐coding) genes and increase in ‘noncoding’ sequences with developmental complexity; genetic loci termed ‘enhancers’ that control spatiotemporal gene expression patterns during development; and a plethora of ‘intergenic’, overlapping, antisense and intronic transcripts. These observations suggest that the original conception of genetic information was deficient and that most genes in complex organisms specify regulatory RNAs, some of which convey intergenerational information. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/qxeGwahBANw. (shrink)

The terms “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” originated in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn. A paradigm can be defined as the generally accepted concepts and practices of a field, and a paradigm shift its replacement in a scientific revolution. A paradigm shift results from a crisis caused by anomalies in a paradigm that reduce its usefulness to a field. Claims of paradigm shifts and revolutions are made frequently in the neurosciences. In this article I will consider neuroscience (...) paradigms, and the claim that new tools and techniques rather than crises have driven paradigm shifts. I will argue that tool development has played a minor role in neuroscience revolutions. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued, firstly, that Kuhnian revolutions in mathematics are logically possible, in the sense of not being inconsistent with the nature of mathematics; and, secondly, that Kuhnian revolutions are actually possible, in the sense that a Kuhnian paradigm for mathematics can be exhibited which would, if accepted by the mathematical community, produce a full Kuhnian revolution. These two arguments depend on first proving that a shift from a classical conception of mathematics (...) to an intuitionist conception would be incommensurable, that is, that some classical statements, possessing meanings which cannot be preserved in the intuitionist language, would become unintelligible. The vague but intriguing thesis is then tentatively advanced that Kuhnian revolutions are even historically possible, in the sense that only what we might call ‘accidental’ historical factors may have prevented mathematics from undergoing just such a Kuhnian revolution in the early years of the twentieth century. (shrink)

A blue-ribbon panel convened by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) concluded in 2010 that teacher education in the United States must be “turned upside down,” with practical experience at its center and academic content woven around the practical. It might seem that the new clinical model based on medical education, which has been adopted by eight states, would be well-aligned with a Deweyan inquiry-based pedagogy. Dewey himself recognized a paradox, however: preparation for the combination of rigor (...) and flexibility needed for inquiry-based pedagogical skills absolutely requires immersion in clinical settings, even as immersion in the teaching environment that prevails in U.S. public schools systematically socializes new teachers to a very different set of skills than those needed for this model of effective pedagogy. Recent scholarship by Kuhnian scholars provides practical guidance for an alternative understanding of how changes in practice occur and may be transmitted to future generations. (shrink)

In this article, the impact of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the sociology of science is evaluated. The main argument is that a questionable construction of Kuhn’s work heralded the constructivist revolution that ultimately contributed to the division between sociology of science and sociology of scientific knowledge. A reorientation of sociology of science that combines institutional and constructivist perspectives is advocated.

In a thought experiment we want to test how the emergence of adult neural stem cells could constitute an example for a scientific revolution in the sense of Thomas Kuhn. In his major work, The structure of scientific revolutions, 3rd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago (Kuhn 1996), the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, states that scientific progress is not a cumulative process, but new theories appear by a rather revolutionary sequence of events. Kuhn built his theory on landmark (...) events taken from chemistry and physics, lacking examples from biology. Beginning with Ramon y Cajal’s famous quote, no new neurons after birth , from the early years of the twentieth century, and Reynolds and Weiss’s conflicting finding in 1992 of adult neural stem cells giving rise to new neurons, we will test how the finding of neural stem cells in the adult brain matches with Kuhn’s theory. The pivotal problem of defining a paradigm will be our main focus, since the emergence of adult neural stem cells has been acclaimed by the scientific community as the rebuttal of Ramon y Cajal’s paradigm. (shrink)

_Abstract_: Fueled by the rapid development of neuroscientific tools and techniques, some scholars consider the shift from traditional cognitive psychology toward cognitive neuroscience to be a _revolution_ (most notably Boone and Piccinini). However, the term “revolution” in philosophy of science can easily be construed as involving a paradigm shift in the sense of Kuhn’s _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_. Is a Kuhnian account sound in the case at hand? To answer this question, we consider heuristic indicators of two (...) features of paradigm shifts: the incommensurability of ontologies; and a gap between scientific communities. Based on our evidence, we argue that no revolution has occurred (at least, not yet). _Keywords_: Cognitive Neuroscience; Cognitive Psychology; Philosophy of Science; Thomas Kuhn; Scientometrics _La “rivoluzione delle neuroscienze cognitive” non è una rivoluzione (in senso kuhniano). Evidenze scientometriche _ _Riassunto_:_ _Complice il rapido sviluppo di strumenti e tecniche in neuroscienze, alcuni studiosi (in particolare Boone e Piccinini) intendono il passaggio dalla psicologia cognitiva classica alla neuroscienza cognitiva nei termini di una _rivoluzione_. Tuttavia, il termine ‘rivoluzione’ in filosofia della scienza è strettamente associato alla nozione di successione di paradigmi esposta da Kuhn ne _La struttura delle rivoluzioni scientifiche_. Obiettivo di questo lavoro è capire se effettivamente la concezione kuhniana offra una corretta descrizione di questa dinamica storica. In particolare, prenderemo in esame due indicatori euristici delle rivoluzioni kuhniane: l’incommensurabilità ontologica trai due paradigmi e la diversa composizione demografica delle comunità scientifiche. Sulla base delle evidenze scientometriche che prenderemo in esame, affermeremo che non è avvenuta nessuna rivoluzione (almeno per ora). _Parole chiave_: Neuroscienze cognitive; Psicologia cognitiva; Filosofia della scienza; Thomas Kuhn; Scientometria. (shrink)

This paper argues that the field of chemistry underwent a significant change of theory in the early twentieth century, when atomic number replaced atomic weight as the principle for ordering and identifying the chemical elements. It is a classic case of a Kuhnian revolution. In the process of addressing anomalies, chemists who were trained to see elements as defined by their atomic weight discovered that their theoretical assumptions were impediments to understanding the chemical world. The only way to (...) normalize the anomalies was to introduce new concepts, and a new conceptual understanding of what it is to be an element. In the process of making these changes, a new scientific lexicon emerged, one that took atomic number to be the defining feature of a chemical element. (shrink)

One of the central problems arising from just the descriptive aspect of Kuhn's theory of scientific development by revolutions concerns the problem of generality. Is Kuhn's theory general enough to encompass the development of all the sciences, including both the natural sciences and the social sciences? The answer to this question is no. It is argued that this negative answer is due not to the nature of the sciences themselves but to the nature of Kuhn's theory and, in particular, its (...) local and reductionistic perspective. First steps toward the construction of a more global and more pluralistic descriptive theory of scientific development are taken. The development of significant episodes in the history of sciences other than physics and chemistry are considered. The immediate goals are to correct the narrow base from which Kuhn starts, to show how some of his basic ideas might be preserved, and to indicate how a theory of types would proceed. (shrink)

The conviction, due to previous failures, that bacteriology and darwinism were incompatible, has postponed the application of molecular phylogenesis to bacteria. But once introduced, this new field has led to a profound revolution of this science. A stable classification of the bacteria is at last possible; a new domain, the Archae, as distant from the Bacteria as from the Eukarya, has been discovered; noncultivable new species can be identified from the environment. It may even be possible to unravel the (...) pathway of early evolution after the common ancestor. However, controversies on this subject are already disregarded by the new paradigm. (shrink)

Important to Kuhn's account of scientific change is the observation that when paradigms are in competition with one another, there is a curious breakdown of rational argument and communication between adherents of competing programs. He attributed this to the fact that competing paradigms are incommensurable. The incommensurability thesis centrally involves the claim that there is a deep conceptual gap between competing paradigms in science. In this paper I argue that in one important case of competing paradigms, the Aristotelian explanation of (...) the properties of bodies in terms of matter and form as opposed to the Cartesian mechanist paradigm, where the properties of bodies are explained on the model of machines, there was no such conceptual gap: the notion of a machine was as fully intelligible on the Aristotelian paradigm as it was on the Cartesian. But this does not mean that the debate between the two sides was conducted on purely rational terms. Rational argument breaks down not because of Kuhnian incommensurability, I argue, but because of other cultural factors separating the two camps. (shrink)

More than 50 years after the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, this volume assesses the adequacy of the Kuhnian model in explaining certain aspects of science, particularly the social and epistemic aspects of science. One argument put forward is that there are no good reasons to accept Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis, according to which scientific revolutions involve the replacement of theories with conceptually incompatible ones. Perhaps, therefore, it is time for another “decisive transformation in (...) the image of science by which we are now possessed.” Only this time, the image of science that needs to be transformed is the Kuhnian one. Does the Kuhnian image of science provide an adequate model of scientific practice? If we abandon the Kuhnian picture of revolutionary change and incommensurability, what consequences would follow from that vis-à-vis our understanding of scientific knowledge as a social endeavour? -/- The essays in this collection continue this debate, offering a critical examination of the arguments for and against the Kuhnian image of science as well as their implications for our understanding of science as a social and epistemic enterprise. (shrink)

I argue that forays into history of science in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962/1996) are by and large instances of “Great Man” history of science. “Great Man” history is the idea that history is the biography of great men. The “Great Man” of science model not only excludes women and people of color from science but also suggests that only special, exceptional people can succeed in science. If this is correct, then Kuhn (1962/1996) fails to usher in a (...) “historiographic revolution in the study of science” or a “new historiography” (Kuhn 1962/1996, 3), as the book purports to do. Instead, it merely perpetuates the defunct historiography of the “Great Man” of science. (shrink)

Friedman’s perspective on scientific change is a sophisticated attempt to combine Kantian transcendental philosophy and the Kuhnian historiographical model. In this article, I will argue that Friedman’s account, despite its virtues, fails to achieve the philosophical goals that it self-consciously sets, namely to unproblematically combine the revolutionary perspective of scientific development and the neo-Kantian philosophical framework. As I attempt to show, the impossibility of putting together these two aspects stems from the incompatibility between Friedman’s neo-Kantian conception of the role (...) of philosophy and the role of the notion of incommensurability, and the framework of transcendental idealism and the radical character of scientific revolutions. Hence, I suggest that pace Friedman and pace Kuhn’s own self-understanding, the Kuhnian theory of scientific revolutions cannot be seen as ‘Kantianism with moveable categories’ and consequently we should either abandon the notion of radical scientific revolution or place the Kuhnian account into another, non-Kantian philosophical framework. (shrink)

This article argues that the field of asset pricing theory is undergoing a scientific revolution in Kuhnian terms. The orthodox view is one of determinate change in causal processes and inherent stability whereby financial markets, left unfettered, allocate nearly perfectly society's scare capital. However, decades of mounting anomalous evidence against the implications of stable causal processes perpetuated by conventional models based on efficient markets and the rational expectations hypothesis have paved the way for alternative avenues of research. Although (...) various approaches are being developed, the imperfect knowledge economics class of models has emerged as a potential new paradigm in the field of macro-finance. By stopping short of fixing in advance the specification of individual forecasting behavior and the causal process, the IKE class of models has been able to reconcile many of the puzzles found within the literature on asset price behavior and risk. (shrink)

Kuhn wanted to install a new research agenda in philosophy of science. I argue that the tools are now available to better articulate his paradigm and let it guide philosophical research instead of itself remaining the object of philosophical debate.

Thomas Kuhn has argued that scientists never reject a paradigm without simultaneously accepting a new paradigm. Coupled with Kuhn's claim that it is paradigms as a whole, and not individual theories, that are accepted or rejected, this thesis is seen as one of Kuhn's main challenges to the rationality of science. I argue that Kuhn is mistaken in this claim; at least in some instances, science rejects a paradigm despite the absence of a successor. In particular, such a description best (...) fits Kuhn's most discussed example, the Copernican Revolution. By differentiating scientific discoveries into three types, spontaneous, implicit, and directed, we see that Kuhn's thesis holds for spontaneous and implicit discoveries, but not directed discoveries. Directed discoveries must be understood by an alternative account of falsifiability, based on argument by reductio ad absurdum rather than argument by modus tollens as traditional accounts of falsifiability would have it. (shrink)

This paper adapts Kuhn’s conceptual framework to developmental episodes in the theory and practice of medicine. Previous attempts to understand the reception of Ignaz Semmelweis’s work on puerperal fever in Kuhnian terms are used as a starting point. The author identifies some limitations of these attempts and proposes a new way of understanding the core Kuhnian notions of “paradigm,” “progress,” and “revolution” in the context of a socially embedded technoscience such as medicine.

Moral revolutions are rightly coming to be recognised as a philosophically interesting and historically important mode of moral change. What is less often acknowledged is that the very characteristics that make a moral change revolutionary pose a fundamental challenge to the possibility of moral progress. This is because moral revolutions are characterised by a diachronic form of deep moral disagreement: moral agents on either side of a moral revolution adopt different standards for assessing the merits of a moral argument, (...) and according to the standards they adopt, agents on neither side of the revolution ought to accept the arguments being put forward by those on the other. This threatens to undermine the progressive status of many of our most celebrated historical examples of moral revolutions: if a moral revolution only looks progressive in light of a change in evaluative standards it itself brought about, then moral progress seems relative to a particular historical perspective; if prior to a moral revolution taking place the moral arguments in its favour fall short of the relevant standards, moral revolutions can never be the outcome of rational argumentation. This apparent relativism and irrationality sits uncomfortably alongside our common-sense intuition that the moral revolutions upon which our contemporary moral worldview rests count as genuine moral progress. In this paper, I deepen currently popular Kuhnian-inspired accounts of moral revolution by incorporating Wittgensteinian ideas from _Philosophical Investigations_ and _On Certainty_. The result is an original way of thinking about deep moral disagreements, moral revolutions, and moral progress. (shrink)

I respond to Scerri’s recent reply to my claim that there was a scientific revolution in chemistry in the early twentieth Century. I grant, as Scerri insists, that there are significant continuities through the change about which we are arguing. That is so in all scientific revolutions. But I argue that the changes were such that they constitute a Kuhnian revolution, not in the classic sense of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but in the sense of Kuhn’s (...) mature theory, developed in the 1980s and early 1990s. (shrink)

My book, "The Darwinian Revolution" gives an overview of the revolution as understood at the time of its writing (1979). It shows that many factors were involved, from straight science through philosophical methodology, and on to religious influences and challenges. Also of importance were social factors, not the least of which was the professionalization of science in Britain in the 19th century. Since the appearance of that book, new, significant factors have become apparent, and here I discuss some (...) of the most important -- especially the way in which evolution as an idea came into being as an epiphenomenon of the ideology of cultural progress; the (often tense) interaction between ideas of biological progress and the urge to professionalization, and of how this led to a delay in the full appreciation of what Charles Darwin had done in the "Origin;" and the ongoing divide between biological functionalists and biological formalists, a Kuhnian-type paradigm difference that persists across the Darwinian revolution. (shrink)

Incommensurability was Kuhn’s worst mistake. If it is to be found anywhere in science, it would be in physics. But revolutions in theoretical physics all embody theoretical unification. Far from obliterating the idea that there is a persisting theoretical idea in physics, revolutions do just the opposite: they all actually exemplify the persisting idea of underlying unity. Furthermore, persistent acceptance of unifying theories in physics when empirically more successful disunified rivals can always be concocted means that physics makes a persistent (...) implicit assumption concerning unity. To put it in Kuhnian terms, underlying unity is a paradigm for paradigms. We need a conception of science which represents problematic assumptions concerning the physical comprehensibility and knowability of the universe in the form of a hierarchy, these assumptions becoming less and less substantial and more and more such that their truth is required for science, or the pursuit of knowledge, to be possible at all, as one goes up the hierarchy. This hierarchical conception of science has important Kuhnian features, but also differs dramatically from the view Kuhn expounds in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In this paper, I compare and contrast these two views in a much more detailed way than has been done hitherto. I show how the hierarchical view can be construed to emerge from Kuhn’s view as it is modified to overcome objections. I argue that the hierarchical conception of science is to be preferred to Kuhn’s view. (shrink)

Contemporary interdisciplinary research is often described as bringing some important changes in the structure and aims of the scientific enterprise. Sometimes, it is even characterized as a sort of Kuhnian scientific revolution. In this paper, the analogy between interdisciplinarity and scientific revolutions will be analysed. It will be suggested that the way in which interdisciplinarity is promoted looks similar to how new paradigms were described and defended in some episodes of revolutionary scientific change. However, contrary to what happens (...) during some scientific revolutions, the rhetoric with which interdisciplinarity is promoted does not seem to be accompanied by a strong agreement about what interdisciplinarity actually is. In the end, contemporary interdisciplinarity could be defined as being in a ‘pre-paradigmatic’ phase, with the very talk promoting interdisciplinarity being a possible obstacle to its maturity. (shrink)

In the Kuhnian and Post-Kuhnian Philosophy of Science, it is widely accepted that scientific revolutions always involve the replacement of an old paradigm by a new paradigm. This article attempts to refute this assumption by showing that there are paradigm-constellations that conform to the relation of a scientific revolution in a Kuhnian sense without a paradigm-replacement occurring. The paradigms investigated here are the linguistic paradigms of Generative Grammar and Construction Grammar that, contrary to Kuhn’s conception of (...) a sequence of paradigm-replacements, are reconstructed as coexisting competing paradigms. By choosing linguistic paradigms, Kuhn’s assumption that paradigm-led research takes place only in the natural sciences is implicitly challenged, and an insight into linguistic theory-construction largely underrepresented in the philosophy of science is given. (shrink)

Abstract“Growth” or “Revolution”? Ernst Cassirer and History of Science. Ernst Cassirer's contributions to history of science have been long time neglected. The aim of this paper is to show the historical and philosophical framework of Cassirer's engagement in this field, starting from his seminal work about the problem of knowledge in science and philosophy of the modern age. Moreover the author suggests that Cassirer's late studies about Galilei and the origins of mathematical science are of some interest in order (...) to comprehend both his commitment to contemporary history of science (from Burtt to Koyré) and his intellectual heritage for our agendas in a post‐Kuhnian era. (shrink)

In the recent and not-too-distant past many of our parents, grandparents and forbears believed that a person’s skin colour and physiognomy, gender, or sexuality licensed them being regarded and treated in ways that are now widely recognised as blatantly unjust, disrespectful, cruel and brutal. But the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries have hosted a series of radical changes in attitudes, beliefs, behaviour and institutionalised practices with regard to the fundamental moral equality of what were once seen as different “kinds of (...) people.” This paper explores the social structure of such “moral revolutions,” via the Wittgensteinian- and Kuhnian- inspired concepts moral perception, moral certainty, normal morality, and moral paradigm. (shrink)

From a Kuhnian perspective, a paradigmatic revolution in management science will significantly improve our understanding of the business world and show practitioners (including managers and consultants) how to become much more effective. Without an objective measure of revolution, however, the door is open for spurious claims of revolutionary advance. Such claims cause confusion among scholars and practitioners and reduce the legitimacy of university management programs. Metatheoretical methods, based on insights from systems theory, provide new tools for analyzing (...) the structure of theory. Propositional analysis is one such method that may be applied to objectively quantify the formal robustness of management theory. In this chapter, I use propositional analysis to analyze different versions of a theory as it evolves across 1,500 years of history. This analysis shows how the increasing robustness of theory anticipates the arrival of revolution and suggests an innovative and effective way for scholars and practitioners to develop and evaluate theories of management. (shrink)

Weinert defends a distinctively anti-Kuhnian position on scientific revolutions, predicating his argument on a nuanced and clear case analysis. He also builds on his previous work on eliminative induction that he sees as the central scientific method in the rise of revolutionary theories. The treatment of social sciences as revolutionary offers the key elements of a promising ambitious project. His botched attempt to portray the Darwinian view of mind as a brand of emergentism is the only weak point if (...) this insightful book. (shrink)

In their reviews of The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation? (2018), both Markus Arnold (2018) and Amanda Bryant (2018) complain that the contributors who criticize Kuhn’s theory of scientific change have misconstrued his philosophy of science and they praise those who seek to defend the Kuhnian image of science. In what follows, then, I would like to address their claims about misconstruing Kuhn’s theory of scientific change. But my focus here, as in the book, (...) will be the evidence (or lack thereof) for the Kuhnian image of science. I will begin with Arnold’s review and then move on to Bryant’s review. (shrink)

Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is notable for the readiness with which it drew on the results of cognitive psychology. These naturalistic elements were not well received and Kuhn did not subsequently develop them in his pub- lished work. Nonetheless, in a philosophical climate more receptive to naturalism, we are able to give a more positive evaluation of Kuhn’s proposals. Recently, philosophers such as Nersessian, Nickles, Andersen, Barker, and Chen have used the results of work on case-based reasoning, analogical thinking, (...) dynamic frames, and the like to illuminate and develop various aspects of Kuhn’s thought in Structure. In particular this work aims to give depth to the Kuhnian concepts of a paradigm and incommensurability. I review this work and identify two broad strands of research. One emphasizes work on concepts; the other focusses on cognitive habits. After contrasting these, I argue that the conceptual strand fails to be a complete account of scientific revolutions. We need a broad approach that draws on a variety of resources in psychology and cognitive science. (shrink)

The lack of an account of rationality in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a lacuna which Thomas Kuhn acutely felt. In this paper, I argue that Herbert Simon’s notion of “satisficing” provides a formally well-developed and empirically well-established theory of rationality that fits well with Kuhn’s general characterization of science. I start by considering two rival interpretations of the problem of Kuhnian rationality and introduce Simon’s notion of satisficing. In Section 3, I show how satisficing can be used (...) to interpret paradigm, change, rational theory-choice, relativism, and progress. On this account, Kuhnian scientists are not irrational. Rather they employ the same computational mechanism which allows humans to play chess. (shrink)

In their account of theory change in logic, Aberdein and Read distinguish 'glorious' from 'inglorious' revolutions--only the former preserves all 'the key components of a theory' [1]. A widespread view, expressed in these terms, is that empirical science characteristically exhibits inglorious revolutions but that revolutions in mathematics are at most glorious [2]. Here are three possible responses: 0. Accept that empirical science and mathematics are methodologically discontinuous; 1. Argue that mathematics can exhibit inglorious revolutions; 2. Deny that inglorious revolutions are (...) characteristic of science. Where Aberdein and Read take option 1, option 2 is preferred by Mizrahi [3]. This paper seeks to resolve this disagreement through consideration of some putative mathematical revolutions. [1] Andrew Aberdein and Stephen Read, The philosophy of alternative logics, The Development of Modern Logic (Leila Haaparanta, ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009, pp. 613-723. [2] Donald Gillies (ed.), Revolutions in Mathematics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992. [3] Moti Mizrahi, Kuhn's incommensurability thesis: What's the argument?, Social Epistemology 29 (2015), no. 4, 361-378. (shrink)

A new chronology is introduced to address the history of chemistry, with educational purposes, particularly for the end of the twentieth century and here identified as the fifth chemical revolution. Each revolution are considered in terms of the Kuhnian notion of ‘exemplar,’ rather than ‘paradigm.’ This approach enables the incorporation of instruments, as well as concepts and the rise of new subdisciplines into the revolutionary process and provides a more adequate representation of such periods of development and (...) consolidation. The fifth revolution developed from 1973 to 1999 and is characterized by a deep transformation in the very heart of chemistry. That is to say, the size and type of objects, the way in which they must be done and the time in which they are transformed. In one way or another, chemistry’ limits had been set out. (shrink)

Summary A pattern can be found in the history of semiconductor electronics, which largely appears to coincide with that of scientific revolutions as described by Thomas Kuhn1. However, the history of semiconductor electronics has some characteristics which suggest that Kuhn's model requires correction in important respects.

This article criticizes the attempts by Bas van Fraassen and Michael Friedman to address the challenge to rationality posed by the Kuhnian analysis of scientific revolutions. In the paper, I argue that van Fraassen's solution, which invokes a Sartrean theory of emotions to account for radical change, does not amount to justifying rationally the advancement of science but, rather, despite his protestations to the contrary, is an explanation of how change is effected. Friedman's approach, which appeals to philosophical developments (...) at a meta-theoretical level, does not really address the problem of rationality as posed by Kuhn's work. Instead of showing how, despite revolutions, scientific development is, indeed, rational, he gives a transcendental account of rational scientific progress. (shrink)

The role of aesthetic factors in science is often mentioned, but seldom discussed in a sustained and systematic way. This thoughtful book is James McAllister’s attempt to do so. McAllister’s treatment engages a broad range of issues, relating aesthetic criteria to such diverse issues as the history of astronomy and twentieth-century physics, theoretical ruptures, and architecture. Its core goals are two. One goal is to show that there is a role for aesthetic considerations in theory choice that is compatible with (...) the rationalist tradition. Here he defends the rationalist image against two recent competitors, a Kuhnian image of science in which the history of science is not incremental and is punctuated by revolutions, and another which holds that “nonrational” aesthetic criteria play a significant role in theory choice. The second goal of this book is to defend a specific account of the role of aesthetic factors in theory choice, what McAllister calls the “aesthetic induction.”. (shrink)

The paper deals with some conceptual trends in the philosophy of science of the 1980‒90s, which being evolved simultaneously with the computer revolution, make room for treating it as a revolution in mathematics. The immense and widespread popularity of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions had made a demand for overcoming this theory, at least in some aspects, just inevitable. Two of such aspects are brought into focus in this paper. Firstly, it is the shift from theoretical to (...) instrumental revolutions which are sometimes called “Galisonian revolutions” after Peter Galison. Secondly, it is the shift from local (“little”) to global (“big”) scientific revolutions now connected with the name of Ian Hacking; such global, transdisciplinary revolutions are at times called “Hacking-type revolutions”. The computer revolution provides a typical example of both global and instrumental revolutions. That change of accents in the post-Kuhnian perspective on scientific revolutions was closely correlated with the general tendency to treat science as far more pluralistic and transdisciplinary. That tendency is primarily associated with the so-called Stanford School; Peter Galison and Ian Hacking are often seen as its representatives. In particular, that new image of science gave no support to a clear-cut separation of mathematics from other sciences. Moreover, it has formed prerequisites for the recognition of material and technical revolutions in the history of mathematics. Especially, the computer revolution can be considered in the new framework as a revolution in mathematics par excellence. (shrink)

The philosophy of Thomas Kuhn proposes that scientific progress involves periods of crisis and revolution in which previous paradigms are discarded and replaced. Revolutions in how mental health problems are conceptualised have had a substantial impact on the work of mental health nurses. However, despite numerous revolutions within the field of mental health, the biological paradigm has remained largely dominant within western healthcare, especially in orientating the understanding and treatment of psychosis. This paper utilises concepts drawn from the philosophy (...) of Thomas Kuhn to explore the impact of what Kuhn terms ‘anomalies’ within the dominant biological paradigm: the anomaly of the meaningful utterance, the anomaly of complex aetiology and taxonomy and the anomaly of pharmacological inefficacy in recovery. The paper argues that the biological paradigm for understanding psychosis is in crisis and explores the implications for mental health nursing. (shrink)