Talk:Thomas Kuhn

I shifted a lot of text - the bit that was just about the book - from this entry to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So I've shifted the Talk: text from here to Talk: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions too. - David Gerard 22:14, Jan 19, 2004 (UTC)

Normal science

Currently this article links to normal science, but this in turn is a redirect right back to here. This should be fixed. Either an actual article on normal science should be started, or the link here should be removed and the term sufficiently explained in this article. -- Timwi 19:56, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Good call. I've replaced the redirect with a stub. If no one else gets around to writing the article in the next month or so, I'll dig out my copy of Kuhn and try to write something useful. -- Jmabel 23:43, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! :-) — Timwi 20:56, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

family

I imagine that the recently added material about family, added anonymously without citation, is probably true, but I'd be a lot more comfortable if it were verified by a registered user. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:05, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)

Link

Recent change noted: The phrase "scientific revolutions", previously linked to "scientific revolution" (which was wrong: that's specifically the Copernican Revolution), is now linked to "paradigm shift", which also fails to discuss the term, but probably should. -- Jmabel | Talk 15:50, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)

Hanson influence?

The article currently makes it sound like Norris Hanson was a huge and major influence on Kuhn's work. My skimming through the footnotes of Structure though doesn't turn him up once. In the preface, Kuhn explicitly lists only the following people as his intellectual influences for the book (his lists a few other people for helping him edit drafts, including Feyerabend, but I don't think that's likely the same thing meant here):

So, I guess what I'm asking is -- are there grounds for highlighting Hanson above all these others? Is this an actor attribution or an analyst one? I think this should be made more clear if we're talking about his philosophical influences. --Fastfission 19:05, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I found a reference to Hanson on page 113 of the 3rd edn: "N.R. Hanson, in particular, has used gestalt demonstrations to elaborate some of the same consequences of scientific belief that concern me here." But that's all he says on that page.. --Fastfission 19:29, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The two most consistently mentioned influences, through The Essential Tension and The Road Since Structure, are Ludwik Fleck and Jean Piaget. --JTBurman 23:20, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Problematic addition

This recent addition seems to me to be well-intentioned, but based on a poor reading of Kuhn. I read him mostly over 25 years ago, so I am not the best one to address this. I'm going to drop a note at Template:PhilosophyTasks. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:58, 26 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. It's a reading of Kuhn which speaks less about what he said than what about some people interpretted him to be saying. --Fastfission 05:09, 27 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think the passage:

"While compelling, Kuhn's theory has an inherent flaw, for if it is in fact taken as "true," it is merely a product of its paradigm and nothing more, therefore rendering it meaningless as anything more than "just" a theory (the problem of reflexivity). Also, taking the theory as true would imply that truth exists in the universe, an idea against which Kuhn argued."

is terrible and should be deleted. The main theory of one of the most influential philosophers of the last 50 years refuted in two sentences? I don't think so. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.86.231.227 (talk • contribs) 27 Oct 2005 (UTC)

OK, I've cut that, and also the rest of the addition. For the record, here is the rest of it. There may be something worth salvaging.

[Begin cut material]

Kuhn also stressed the importance of incommensurability among paradigms, meaning that science from one paradigm cannot have a greater or lesser truth-value than science from another. The act of science to Kuhn was no more than problem solving within a paradigm, and each successive paradigm led not to more verisimilitude ("truth-likeness"), but instead merely perpetuated the field of science. According to Kuhn, theories in in the next paradigm, whether it begins in five years or five-hundred years, will be no more truth-like than the theories we have now; they will, in fact, be incommensurable.

These ideas of a lack of an absolute truth to be gathered from the world via empirical observations spurred the thoughts of many postmodern deconstructionists, even though Kuhn himself never associated himself with that branch of philosophy.

[End cut material]

As I understand it, this is a mix of ideas actually found in Kuhn (incommensurability, epistemological rejection of a provable Truth), unfounded extrapolation (the implication that change of paradigm cannot represent progress), and a suggestive but insubstantial remark (yes, there is probably a partial temperamental relationship to the deconstructionalists, but less than to Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations, R.G. Collingwood in his The Idea of History; if we want to go to Continental Philosophy for our comparison, Michel Foucault, especially in the era of The Order of Things, is probably closer to the point than the deconstructionists, although I think Foucault had a more pessimistic view of the possibility, or at least the likelihood, of progress.)

Again, this engages material that probably belongs in the article, but it belongs there better expressed and with appropriate citation, as views of scholars, not of the "narrator". As I said, it's 25 years since I read much of Kuhn, so I'm probably not the one to write it. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:45, 28 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Peer Review

I have added this section as per the tasks note at PhilosophyTasks. --JTBurman 23:27, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Incommensurability

In the autobiographical interview conducted in 1995, and published in The Road Since Structure (2000), Kuhn describes his "philosophical problematic" as focussing on incommensurability: that, in short, is why there are punctuations in paradigm change. Yet there is no mention of it here. Incommensurability is required before this article can be considered complete. --JTBurman 23:27, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]