Interpreting Kuhn

"One might wonder if there is anything new to say about Thomas Kuhn and his views on science. Scholarship on Kuhn, though, has changed dramatically in the last 20 years. This is so for a number reasons"--

In 1962, the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure ‘revolutionized’ the way one conducts philosophical and historical studies of science. Through the introduction of both memorable and controversial notions, such as paradigms, scientific revolutions, and incommensurability, Kuhn argued against the traditionally accepted notion of scientific change as a progression towards the truth about nature, and instead substituted the idea that science is a puzzle solving activity, operating under paradigms, which become discarded after it fails to respond accordingly to anomalous challenges and a rival paradigm. Kuhn’s Structure has sold over 1.4 million copies and the Times Literary Supplement named it one of the “Hundred Most Influential Books since the Second World War.” Now, fifty years after this groundbreaking work was published, this volume offers a timely reappraisal of the legacy of Kuhn’s book and an investigation into what Structure offers philosophical, historical, and sociological studies of science in the future.

Examines the influences on and impact of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

A distinctive feature of Ludwig Wittgenstein's work after 1930 was his turn to a conception of philosophy as a form of social inquiry, John G. Gunnell argues, and Thomas Kuhn's approach to the philosophy of science exemplified this conception. In this book, Gunnell shows how these philosophers address foundational issues in the social and human sciences, particularly the vision of social inquiry as an interpretive endeavor and the distinctive cognitive and practical relationship between social inquiry and its subject matter. Gunnell speaks directly to philosophers and practitioners of the social and human sciences. He tackles the demarcation between natural and social science; the nature of social phenomena; the concept and method of interpretation; the relationship between language and thought; the problem of knowledge of other minds; and the character of descriptive and normative judgments about practices that are the object of inquiry. Though Wittgenstein and Kuhn are often criticized as initiating a modern descent into relativism, this book shows that the true effect of their work was to undermine the basic assumptions of contemporary social and human science practice. It also problematized the authority of philosophy and other forms of social inquiry to specify the criteria for judging such matters as truth and justice. When Wittgenstein stated that "philosophy leaves everything as it is," he did not mean that philosophy would be left as it was or that philosophy would have no impact on what it studied, but rather that the activity of inquiry did not, simply by virtue of its performance, transform the object of inquiry.

Thomas Kuhn's celebrated work, 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' revolutionized thinking in the philosophy of science and to a large extent his 'paradigm shift' view has replaced logical positivism and the philosophy of Karl Popper. This book goes beyond Kuhn by explicating the non-deductive notion of 'paradigm shift' in terms of the new concept of representational space. In doing so, Edwin H.-C. Hung is able to produce the first-ever unitary theory that solves the five central problems in the philosophy of science: scientific explanation, the structure of scientific theories, incommensurability, scientific change and physical necessity. The book identifies the main task of science as representing reality. This involves the construction of a representational space and the subsequent modeling of reality with configurations of 'objects' in that space. Newton's mechanics, Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics, then, all serve as representational spaces. 'Beyond Kuhn' is a significant progression in scientific methodology. Other than serving as a sequel to Kuhn's 'Scientific Revolutions', it will be of great use in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology and education.

This book presents essays and commentaries that continue on Thomas Kuhn’s work from where he left off at the time of his death. Contrary to other books, this volume picks up the gauntlet to develop, from a contemporary perspective, some points that can be improved in the light of recent findings and conceptualizations in metatheory. Thus, this work pays a visit to the classical Kuhnian landscapes, but rather proposing interpretations, it takes them as the starting point to go further. One hundred years after Kuhn's birth, the editors and authors rekindle the passion and interest that have always surrounded the work of the great Boston philosopher and historian.

This volume provides a forum for debate between varied approaches to the past. The authors, drawn from Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia, represent many different strands of archaeology. They address the philosophical issues involved in interpretation and a desire among archaeologists to come to terms with their own subjective approaches to the material they study, a recognition of how past researchers have also imposed their own value systems on the evidence which they presented.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis never wrote a memoir, but she told her life story and revealed herself in intimate ways through the nearly 100 books she brought into print as an editor at Viking and Doubleday during the last two decades of her life. Many Americans regarded Jackie as the paragon of grace, but few knew her as the woman sitting on her office floor laying out illustrations, or flying to California to persuade Michael Jackson to write his autobiography. William Kuhn provides a behind-the-scenes look at Jackie at work: commissioning books and nurturing authors, helping to shape stories that spoke to her. Based on archives and interviews with her authors, colleagues, and friends, Reading Jackie reveals the serious and the mischievous woman underneath the glamorous public image.