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KUHN'S EDUCATION: WITTGENSTEIN, PEDAGOGY, AND THE ROAD TO STRUCTURE*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2012

JOEL ISAAC
JOEL ISAAC*
Affiliation:
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge E-mail: jti20@cam.ac.uk
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Extract

Among the topics discussed in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, those of education, training, and pedagogy are apt to seem the least compelling. Certainly, the earliest debates about Structure focused on other, more controversial, matters: incommensurability, meaning change, the rationality of theory choice, normal science—the list goes on. Over the past two decades, however, a growing concern among historians and sociologists of science with the nature of scientific apprenticeship has stimulated greater appreciation of the importance of questions of teaching and learning to the philosophical position sketched in Structure. This paper seeks to develop further our understanding of these issues as they bear on Kuhn's theory of science.

Type
Forum: Kuhn's Structure at Fifty
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , April 2012 , pp. 89 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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18 Kaiser, “Introduction,” 2. Kaiser is also characterizing the work of Michael Polanyi, which is obviously not at issue in the present paper.

19 Kuhn, Structure, 43–51.

20 Kuhn, “Essential Tension”; idem, “The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science,” Isis 52 (1961), 161–93.

21 Kuhn, Structure, 44–5.

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38 Kuhn, “The Sciences in the Harvard General Education Program,” n.d. (c.early 1950s), box 12, TSKP.

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43 Kuhn, “Untitled Talk.”

44 Richardson, Alan, “‘That Sort of Everyday Image of Logical Positivism’: Thomas Kuhn and the Decline of Logical Empiricist Philosophy of Science,” in Richardson, Alan and Uebel, Thomas, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism (Cambridge, 2007), 346–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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46 Kuhn to David Owen, 6 Jan. 1951, box 3, TSKP.

47 Kuhn, “Introduction: Textbook Science and Creative Science,” 1951, box 3, TSKP.

48 Kuhn, “Notes & Ideas,” 1949, box 1, TSKP.

49 Kuhn, “Introduction.”

50 Kuhn to Philipp Frank, n.d. (c. 1952, letter unsent), box 25, TSKP.

51 Kuhn to Charles Morris, 31 July 1953, box 25, TSKP.

52 Kuhn, “Penultimate draft of Structure, before June 1960,” 1960, box 4, TSKP.

53 Ibid.

54 Kuhn, Structure, 23.

55 Janik, Allan, “Impure Reason Vindicated,” in Pichler, Alois and Säätelä, Simo, eds., Wittgenstein: The Philosopher and His Works (Working Papers from the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, No. 17) (Bergen, 2005), 263–80Google Scholar.