STS112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Whig History, Aristotelian Physics, Scientific Method
8 Jun 2018
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Week 11: Kuhn
Kuhn
• Born in 1922 and died in 1996, Kuhn is well known as the author of a most cited academic book ‘The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions’
• Became interested in Aristotelian Physics and became troubled by Whig historians treating it as irrational
• Kuhn observes that in these major traditions of science long periods of stability and much briefer but
turbulent periods of change
• Contributions:
o Legacy of popularizing the term ‘paradigm’
Implications of Kuhn’s Work
• Raises questions about:
o How social, psychological factors shape the choices scientists make between theories
o The relevance of demarcating science on the basis of a single scientific method
o The way we define scientific progress
The Great Scientific Traditions
• Pre-science
o Lack of theoretical agreement on basics
o Possible to observe different things
o Think of the world as being constituted from different things (Metaphysics)
o Disagreement on ways of gaining knowledge
• Normal Science (paradigm)
o Agreement on ‘basics’ sufficient to ‘see the same things’
o Agree about what nature is made up of
o Basic agreement about what counts as valid knowledge
o Agree on problems, use similar scientific methods, ideal problem solutions and exemplars
• Crisis/Revolution
o Anomalies: problems begin to build up within the paradigm that are perceived to question the building
blocks of the paradigm
• New Normal Science (paradigm)
o Revolutionary not because it has answered anomalies in a simple sense, but has done so, by significantly
redefining the questions to make them largely redundant
• Crisis/Revolution
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