Thomas Kuhn
However, the incommensurability thesis is not Kuhn's only positive philosophical thesis. Kuhn himself tells us that “The paradigm as shared example is the central element of what I now take to be the most novel and least understood aspect of [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]” (1970a, 187). Nonetheless, Kuhn failed to develop the paradigm concept in his later work beyond an early application of its semantic aspects to the explanation of incommensurability. The explanation of scientific development in terms of paradigms was not only novel but radical too, insofar as it gives a naturalistic explanation of belief-change. Naturalism was not in the early 1960s the familiar part of philosophical landscape that it has subsequently become. Kuhn's explanation contrasted with explanations in terms of rules of method (or confirmation, falsification etc.) that most philosophers of science took to be constitutive of rationality. Furthermore, the relevant disciplines (psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence) were either insufficiently progressed to support Kuhn's contentions concerning paradigms, or were antithetical to them (in the case of classical AI). Now that naturalism has become an accepted component of philosophy, there has recently been interest in reassessing Kuhn's work in the light of developments in the relevant sciences, many of which provide corroboration for Kuhn's claim that science is driven by relations of perceived similarity and analogy to existing problems and their solutions (Nickles 2003b, Nersessian 2003). It may yet be that a characteristically Kuhnian thesis will play a prominent part in our understanding of science.
There is no secret that I endeavor to see differently of all that we currently see now. This would have been under the auspice of scientific validation. Because we see science expressed in a different theoretcial light, do we discard the process for what Postdiction means?
Here in this Blog, it is by my attempting to understand the process that I have been lead to the experimental basis, of what Lubos and Nima offer for us reading about what we may find in the LHC collisions.
At this site you will find the new black boxes and calibration samples for the LHC Olympics! See:Instead of the Pea, What New Paradigm?
It is very complex indeed that such particle tracings would have been deducted from level of understanding that our view would have quickly changed too? Where had we been brought to now? :)
Gluonic plasma perception holds a interesting new plateau for consideration and D Brane considerations what role do they play? Ask Peter?
The Revolution that Didn't Happen by Steven Weinberg
I first read Thomas Kuhn's famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions1 a quarter-century ago, soon after the publication of the second edition. I had known Kuhn only slightly when we had been together on the faculty at Berkeley in the early 1960s, but I came to like and admire him later, when he came to MIT. His book I found exciting.
Evidently others felt the same. Structure has had a wider influence than any other book on the history of science. Soon after Kuhn's death in 1996, the sociologist Clifford Geertz remarked that Kuhn's book had "opened the door to the eruption of the sociology of knowledge" into the study of the sciences. Kuhn's ideas have been invoked again and again in the recent conflict over the relation of science and culture known as the science wars.
I often hear some scientists speak of the "denigration of true science" by the intrusion of philosophical perspective. Does science by it's nature not move it's perspective into the issues of morality and ethics, as well as the political process? :)