Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Analytic social epistemology
- Common sense versus collective memory
- Consensus versus dissent
- Criticism
- Disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity
- Epistemic justice
- Evolution
- Expertise
- Explaining the cognitive content of science
- Explaining the normative structure of science
- Feminism
- Folk epistemology
- Free enquiry
- Historiography
- Information science
- Knowledge management
- Knowledge policy
- Knowledge society
- Kuhn, Popper and logical positivism
- Mass media
- Multiculturalism
- Naturalism
- Normativity
- Philosophy versus sociology
- Postmodernism
- Progress
- Rationality
- Relativism versus constructivism
- Religion
- Rhetoric
- Science and technology studies
- Science as a social movement
- Science wars
- Social capital versus public good
- Social constructivism
- Social epistemology
- Social science
- Sociology of knowledge
- Translation
- Truth, reliability and the ends of knowledge
- Universalism versus relativism
- University
- Bibliography
- Index
Kuhn, Popper and logical positivism
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Analytic social epistemology
- Common sense versus collective memory
- Consensus versus dissent
- Criticism
- Disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity
- Epistemic justice
- Evolution
- Expertise
- Explaining the cognitive content of science
- Explaining the normative structure of science
- Feminism
- Folk epistemology
- Free enquiry
- Historiography
- Information science
- Knowledge management
- Knowledge policy
- Knowledge society
- Kuhn, Popper and logical positivism
- Mass media
- Multiculturalism
- Naturalism
- Normativity
- Philosophy versus sociology
- Postmodernism
- Progress
- Rationality
- Relativism versus constructivism
- Religion
- Rhetoric
- Science and technology studies
- Science as a social movement
- Science wars
- Social capital versus public good
- Social constructivism
- Social epistemology
- Social science
- Sociology of knowledge
- Translation
- Truth, reliability and the ends of knowledge
- Universalism versus relativism
- University
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
“Kuhn, Popper and logical positivism” refers to an intellectual trajectory from which philosophy has arguably exerted its greatest cross-disciplinary influence in the second half of the twentieth century. At the very least, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is generally acknowledged as the most influential single book on the nature of science in this period. It continues to be popular with humanists and social scientists, although Kuhn thought he had nothing of interest to say to them, except that their knowledge pursuits failed to fit his cyclical model of normal and revolutionary science. (See science as a social movement.) Interestingly, Kuhn singularly failed to persuade the physicists in whose subject he was professionally trained and whose history provides the primary data for his model. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that Structure is a remarkably self-exemplifying text, since Kuhn correctly – if again unwittingly – identified the key psychosocial mechanism responsible for his own book's success.
If, as Socrates believed, the recognition of ignorance is the first step to wisdom, then Structure has proved to be an obstruction. The book did much to establish the relevance of the history of science to an understanding of contemporary science, but without encouraging its readers to check the accuracy or applicability of Kuhn's particular version. Readers claim to have found in Kuhn's account of paradigm formation a compelling model for their own disciplines.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Knowledge BookKey Concepts in Philosophy, Science and Culture, pp. 88 - 93Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2007