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"Perspectives on Kuhn: Contemporary Approaches to the Philosophy of Thomas Kuhn" is a book that emerged from a conference in Argentina and Uruguay, featuring five substantial papers and five commentaries. The topics covered in the book include epistemological coherentism, the philosophical nature of 'structure,' the theoretical background of Kuhn's philosophy, incommensurability, and 'world change.' The papers present new claims and assessments of Kuhn's philosophy, while the commentaries highlight potential issues and areas for further exploration. The book offers valuable insights into Kuhn scholarship and is a well-structured and accomplished collection. [Extracted from the article]

The paper addresses the issue of theory-ladenness of observation/experimentation. Motivated by a naturalistic reading of Thomas Kuhn's insights into the same topic, I draw on cognitive neuroscience (predictive coding under Free Energy Principle) to scrutinise theory-ladenness. I equate theory-ladenness with the cognitive penetrability of perceptual inferences and argue that strong theory-ladenness prevails only under uncertain circumstances. This understanding of theory-ladenness is in line with Thomas Kuhn's view on the same subject as well as a cognitive version of modest realism rather than downright antirealism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karl Popper emphasized that to distinguish science from pseudoscience, a theoretical system must be falsified, not verified. This paper aims to show that management science research meets the empirical truth criteria Popper identified as the demarcation of science. The findings of this study show that Karl Popper's critical rationalism has limitations when applied to the field of management research. In addition, this article highlights the importance of Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos' critique of Popper's rationalist approach in contributing to the development of management science. Although Popper's critical rationalism has been widely discussed in various papers, there is a research gap in how to integrate Popper's ideas along with the critiques of Kuhn and Lakatos, in particular, into management theory. This paper seeks to address this gap. The pragmatic truth of management theories used by management practitioners must also meet the criteria of empirical truth based on Popper's concept of rationalism, which also includes the critiques of Kuhn and Lakatos. The implications of this research suggest that the Lakatos thinking model approach is the most appropriate for the current state of management science, while also noting the relevant elements of Popper and Kuhn's theories and how these elements can be used to strengthen the Lakatos model approach. Management science with the Lakatos model approach can provide a stronger framework for evaluating management practices and theories, resulting in a more effective and scientifically grounded decision-making process in the field of management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning 60 years ago, Thomas Kuhn has had a significant impact across the academy and on culture more widely. And he had a great impact on science education research, theorising, and pedagogy. For the majority of educators, the second edition (1970) of his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1970a) articulated the very nature of the science, the discipline they were teaching. More particularly, Kuhn's book directly influenced four burgeoning research fields in science education: Children's Conceptual Change, Constructivism, Science-Technology-Society studies, and Cultural Studies of Science Education. This paper looks back to the Kuhnian years in science education and to the long shadow they cast. The discipline of science education needs to learn from its past so that comparable mistakes might be averted in the future. Kuhn's influence was good and bad. Good, that he brought HPS to so many; bad, that, on key points, his account of science was flawed. This paper will document the book's two fundamental errors: namely, its Kantian-influenced ontological idealism and its claims of incommensurability between competing paradigms. Both had significant flow-on effects. Although the book had many positive features, this paper will document how most of these ideas and insights were well established in HPS literature at the time of its 1962 publication. Kuhn was not trained in philosophy, he was not part of the HPS tradition, and to the detriment of all, he did not engage with it. This matters, because before publication he could have abandoned, modified, or refined much of his 'revolutionary' text. Something that he subsequently did, but this amounted to closing the gate after the horse had bolted. In particular, the education horse had well and truly bolted. While educators were rushing to adopt Kuhn, many philosophers, historians, and sociologists were rejecting him. Kuhn did modify and 'walk back' many of the head-turning, but erroneous, claims of Structure. But his retreat went largely unnoticed in education, and so the original, deeply flawed Structure affected the four above-mentioned central research fields. The most important lesson to be learnt from science education's uncritical embrace of Kuhn and Kuhnianism is that the problems arose not from personal inadequacies; individuals are not to blame. There was a systematic, disciplinary deficiency. This needs to be addressed by raising the level of philosophical competence in the discipline, beginning with the inclusion of HPS in teacher education and graduate programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine Thomas Kuhn's epistolary and in-person exchanges with Richard Rorty, and their significance to the former's work on the nature of scientific development during the years 1976–1986. Accordingly, it corresponds to a significant evolution of Kuhn's thought from the position expounded earlier in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. These letters show how Kuhn's philosophy of science evolved towards a greater emphasis on a key aspect of his former work—the nature of 'the essential tension'—and that his more linguistically-oriented perspective in these latter years has that emphasis as its goal—at least as a significant part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Thomas Kuhn's mature conception of incommensurable theories as collective structured lexicons that are not mutually translatable. As will be argued, his view on this issue can profitably be approached in the light of the broad pragmatist attitude that one finds at the core of Wittgenstein's late philosophy of language, which can also consistently be ascribed to Kuhn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about the paper presented by an American physicist Thomas S. Kuhn titled "Rhetoric and Liberation" at the University of Iowa Humanities Symposium on the Rhetoric of the Human Sciences on March 28, 1984 is presented. Topics include the book "The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs," historical development of rhetorical scholarship and rhetorical analysis of scientific and mathematical language.

This paper examines 'The Natures of Conceptual Change', the Notre Dame lectures given by Kuhn in 1980. In particular, I aim to examine the content of these lectures which was not published before. This exegetical task will shed light on the sources of the notion of taxonomy used in these lectures for the first time with the explicit philosophical purposes. It also will shed new light on Kuhn's position regarding the causal theory of reference. Reviewing these archival materials paves the way for intertextual comparisons, as Kuhn included part of these lectures in the texts published later and in the book Plurality of Worlds: an Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development. In recent years, the publication of Kuhn's archival material and the research on these texts increased in quantity and quality. Faced with this encouraging landscape, a comparative examination of the different unpublished texts is crucial to refining both our research tools on Kuhn's intellectual biography and the philosophical work inspired by his proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper explores Thomas Kuhn's intellectual history by examining sources that have been understudied so far: the Lowell Lectures of 1951 (The Quest for Physical Theory) and the hitherto unpublished Notre Dame Lectures of 1980. The analysis of these texts aims to reconstruct Kuhn's development of a semantics that can account for scientific progress. This analysis will show that the alleged "linguistic turn" attributed to the author is actually a renewed interest in problems that existed well before publishing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the mid-1960s until the late 1980s, the well-known general philosophies of science of the time were applied to economics. The result was disappointing: none seemed to fit. This paper argues that this is due to a special feature of economics: it possesses 'orientational paradigms' in high number. Orientational paradigms are similar to Kuhn's paradigms in that they are shared across scientific communities, but dissimilar to Kuhn's paradigms in that they are not generally accepted as valid guidelines for further research. As will be shown by several examples, orientational paradigms provide economics with common points of reference that support its epistemic coherence and make scientific discourse more easily possible across school boundaries. With the help of systematicity theory, a newer general philosophy of science, one can further elucidate the role of orientational paradigms with regard to scientific progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper aims to examine the role of James March and his actor-network in the development of a functionalist paradigm of organization theory (OT). Recognizing the important contribution of March to the development of the field of OT, the authors set out to understand the role that he played in establishing the oft-quoted development of founding a behavioral facet of the functionalist paradigm of management theory. Design/methodology/approach: The authors draw on ANTi-History to study some of the key factors that contributed to the challenges associated with the creation of a functionalist paradigm of OT. ANTi-History is an amodernist method drawing attention to how history is produced, differing from a modernist method for identifying the single-most truth of a series of past events and from a postmodernist method for revealing the relativity of accounts of the past. To that end, the method of ANTi-History is to explore the intersections of a series of human (e.g. scholars), non-human (e.g. a textbook) and non-corporeal (e.g. paradigms) actors to assess their role in producing a version of the past (e.g. a unified field of OT). Findings: The authors reveal how the history, producing the paradigmatic idea of OT as a supposed field of inquiry, is not an account of an actual field of inquiry as much as it is the outcome of the shared and conflicted worldviews of multiple actors. Originality/value: The unique and original contribution is in the tracking over time of the relationship between a known and important actor James March and the formation of a specific paradigm of OT. In particular, the authors focus on the factors and activities that formed or failed to form OT at points in time and James March's role in this. In the process, the authors set out to learn not simply what James March achieved but how he achieved it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas there is much discussion about Thomas Kuhn's notion of methodological incommensurability and many have seen his ideas as an attempt to allow for rational disagreement in science, so far no serious analysis of how exactly Kuhn aims to account for rational disagreement has been proposed. This paper provides the first in-depth analysis of Kuhn's account of rational disagreement in science—an account that can be seen as the most prominent attempt to allow for rational disagreement in science. Three things will be shown: First, we find not one, but two accounts of rational disagreements in science in Kuhn's writings: one stemming from methodological incommensurability and one stemming from Kuhn-underdetermination, which are not only fundamentally different—the first purports to explain how disagreeing scientists can nevertheless be rational, while the second attempts to show how rational scientists can nevertheless disagree—but appear to be incompatible with each other. Second, I will assess both accounts. Kuhn's account from methodological incommensurability is not convincing since it cannot explain rational disagreement in science. Whereas, on the other hand, Kuhn's account from Kuhn-underdetermination allows for rational disagreement, his argument why we should accept it is not convincing. Third, I present a tentative sketch of an alternative to Kuhn's account that emphasizes the fallibility of epistemic justification in order to show that Kuhn's argument founders. In sum, the paper shows that focusing not on the muchly debated consequences of methodological incommensurability, but on Kuhn's treatment of rational disagreement gives new insight into the adequate interpretation of his thought as well as the cogency of his ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Errol Morris has claimed that Kuhn threw an ashtray at him during a dispute about some matter in the history of science. Morris also claims that Kuhn threw him out of the graduate program at Princeton for disagreeing with him. I argue that Morris's attack on Kuhn contains some degree of hyperbole. Further, I present evidence that shows that Morris is mistaken about key events during this period. In fact, Kuhn was supportive of Morris in his pursuit of a career in the history of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his mature writings, Kuhn describes the process of specialisation as driven by a form of incommensurability, defined as a conceptual/linguistic barrier which promotes and guarantees the insularity of specialties. In this paper, we reject the idea that the incommensurability among scientific specialties is a linguistic barrier. We argue that the problem with Kuhn's characterisation of the incommensurability among specialties is that he presupposes a rather abstract theory of semantic incommensurability, which he then tries to apply to his description of the process of specialisation. By contrast, this paper follows a different strategy: after criticising Kuhn's view, it takes a further look at how new scientific specialties emerge. As a result, a different way of understanding incommensurability among specialties will be proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an essay published in 2006 in Environment and Planning A and in a second essay published in 2016 in this journal, Mimi Sheller and John Urry have made the case for the emergence of a new social science paradigm – "the new mobilities paradigm". Sheller and Urry argue that the spectrum of published mobility-related theory and empirical research, taken in its entirety, may be described as a paradigm. This use of the term "paradigm" only minimally resembles Thomas Kuhn's description of a paradigm. Moreover, the mobilities literature they cite in support of the claim that a mobilities paradigm is emerging in the social sciences is informed not by a mobilities paradigm but by a diversity of extant social science paradigms. As described by Sheller and Urry, the central theoretical characteristic of this paradigm has been to conceptualize mobility as composed of complex social systems. The term "the new mobilities paradigm" is a misnomer; it is not a mobilities paradigm but a systems theory paradigm with a mobility focus. Given the continued academic prestige attached to the designation "paradigm" since the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, there are symbolic and material benefits to be gained in describing the theory and research cited by Sheller and Urry as a "paradigm". Nevertheless, the general acceptance of the paradigm claim by mobility scholars stands in the way of adequately conceptualizing what kind of intellectual endeavor mobility studies might be, as well as efforts to "mobilize" mobility scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the importance of the "historiographical revolution" in Kuhn's work, he did not carry out a specific study about it. Without a systematic investigation into it, he even affirms that the "old" historiography of science (OHS) is unhistorical, suggesting its summary disqualification in the face of his "new historiography" of science (NHS). My wider project, of which this paper is a part, is to better discuss the issue of the justification of the NHS. In this paper, I discuss the justification (and the genesis) of the OHS, focusing on Condorcet and Comte and resorting especially to Koyré. This will allow us to understand that the relation between the OHS and the NHS is a new instance of inter-theoretical incommensurability. And, indeed, that the NHS is not stricto senso a new historiography. It is the same historiography used for other disciplines (art, philosophy), which in the twentieth century begins to be applied to science as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kuhn (The essential tension-Selected studies in scientific tradition and change, 1977) claimed that several algorithms can be defended to select the best theory based on epistemic values such as simplicity, accuracy, and fruitfulness. In a recent paper, Okasha (Mind 129(477):83-115, 2011) argued that no theory choice algorithm exists which satisfies a set of intuitively compelling conditions that Arrow (Social choice and individual values, 1963) had proposed for a consistent aggregation of individual preference orderings. In this paper, we put forward a solution to avoid this impossibility result. Based on previous work by Gaertner and Xu (Mathematical Social Sciences 63:193-196, 2012), we suggest to view the theory choice problem in a cardinal context and to use a general scoring function defined over a set of qualitative verdicts for every epistemic value. This aggregation method yields a complete and transitive ranking and the rule satisfies all Arrovian conditions appropriately reformulated within a cardinal setting. We also propose methods that capture the aggregation across different scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History & Foundations of Science is the property of Universidad del Pais Vasco, Servicio Editorial and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Art Inquiry is the property of Lodz Scientific Society / Lodzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article praises a paper written by Elvira Panaiotidi regarding the nature of paradigms and paradigm shifts in music education. In her paper, Panaiotidi discusses the debate over the approaches in music education by Reimer and Elliott in the context of paradigm shifts. The term, paradigm shift, was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 in his highly influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn proposes that almost every significant break-through in the field of scientific endeavor is first a break with tradition, with old ways of thinking, with old paradigms. Panaiotidi discusses the need for change in theory and practice in music education. She suggests a solution in terms of a paradigm shift from the recent polemic between aestheticians and praxialists. Undoubtedly, Panaiotidi is dismissing the true concept of the theory of Kuhn that in order for there to be a paradigm shift, one must break from tradition or old paradigms so that new thinking will emerge. Moreover, There must be a true paradigm shift in music education .This kind of shift must be a transformation or metamorphosis that does not just happen through random events, but rather is a gradual process driven by agents of change.

For Kuhn, there are a number of values which provide scientists with a shared basis for theory-choice. These values include accuracy, breadth, consistency, simplicity and fruitfulness. Each of these values may be interpreted in different ways. Moreover, there may be conflict between the values in application to specific theories. In this short paper, Kuhn's idea of scientific values is extended to the value of academic freedom. The value of academic freedom may be interpreted in a number of different ways. Moreover, there are other values which play a role in the functioning of our academic institutions. As with the possible conflict between scientific values, there may be conflict among the academic values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many cognitive psychologists have come to regard graded belief as fundamental to our understanding of how humans reason and many have also come to think of probability theory as providing at least part of the norms of correct reasoning. David Over has characterized this development as the emergence of a new paradigm in the Kuhnian sense. The target article argues that the choice of this term was unwarranted and also that it has done more harm than good. This commentary argues that there is nothing in Thomas Kuhn's work to suggest that he would object to Over's terminological choice and that there is no evidence that the choice has caused any harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I study Engels' ideas on dialectical materialism, from the perspective of Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of science. I argue that Engels' efforts, in works such as Anti-Düring or (even more so) in his Dialectics of Nature, are best understood as an attempt to crystalize a new scientific paradigm, in the sense that Kuhn (2000) gives to this last word. In order to do this, I start by identifying Marx's previous statement regarding this topic. Then I present Kuhn's concept of a "disciplinary matrix". Thirdly, I apply the aforementioned concept to Engels' work, identifying all the elements of the disciplinary matrix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the book The Essential Tension (1979) Thomas Kuhn described the conflict between tradition and innovation in scientific research—i.e., the desire to explore new promising areas, counterposed to the need to capitalize on the work done in the past. While it is probable that along their careers many scientists felt this tension, only few works have tried to quantify it. Here, we address this question by analyzing a large-scale dataset, containing all the papers published by the American Physical Society (APS) in 26 years, which allows for a better understanding of scientists' careers evolution in Physics. We employ the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS) present in each paper to map the scientific interests of 103,246 authors and their evolution along the years. Our results indeed confirm the existence of the "essential tension" with scientists balancing between exploring the boundaries of their area and exploiting previous work. In particular, we found that although the majority of physicists change the topics of their research, they stay within the same broader area thus exploring with caution new scientific endeavors. Furthermore, we quantify the flows of authors moving between different subfields and pinpoint which areas are more likely to attract or donate researchers to the other ones. Overall, our results depict a very distinctive portrait of the evolution of research interests in Physics and can help in designing specific policies for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the most fruitful place for historians of science to look for and investigate science’s imagined pasts is in the literature reviews and bibliographies of scientific papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analytical notions of 'thought style', 'paradigm', 'episteme' and 'style of reasoning' are some of the most popular frameworks in the history and philosophy of science. Although their proponents, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Ian Hacking, are all part of the same philosophical tradition that closely connects history and philosophy, the extent to which they share similar assumptions and objectives is still under debate. In the first part of the paper, I shall argue that, despite the fact that these four thinkers disagree on certain assumptions, their frameworks have the same explanatory goal – to understand how objectivity is possible. I shall present this goal as a necessary element of a common project -- that of historicising Kant's a priori. In the second part of the paper, I shall make an instrumental use of the insights of these four thinkers to form a new model for studying objectivity. I shall also propose a layered diagram that allows the differences between the frameworks to be mapped, while acknowledging their similarities. This diagram will show that the frameworks of style of reasoning and episteme illuminate conditions of possibility that lie at a deeper level than those considered by thought styles and paradigms. • I argue that, although Fleck's, Kuhn's, Foucault's and Hacking's frameworks are based on different assumptions, they have the same goal: to understand how objectivity is possible. • I provide a model for studying objectivity that incorporates the frameworks of Fleck, Foucault, Kuhn and Hacking. • I show that, used together, these frameworks provide a more profound understanding of how objectivity emerges. • I propose a layered diagram that maps the differences between the frameworks of thought style, episteme, paradigm and style of reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a position I call "apathetic pragmatism." Apathetic pragmatism is a form of pragmatism that, through advocating "apathy" about the topic of truth, avoids the troubled identification of utility and truth found in classical and neo pragmatist theories of truth. Initially explored by Stephen Stich, I argue Stich's case for apathetic pragmatism relies upon a theory of truth that causes vicious circularity. I then pursue a different route to apathetic pragmatism, one that sees apathetic pragmatism as a "paradigm shift" in relation to previous forms of pragmatism. It is a paradigm shift where pragmatism becomes a normative view concerning the questions that are necessary to ask, not an attempt to answer questions assumed necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Kuhnian view of theory choice, theories, as a matter of empirical fact, often score differently with regard to the standard theoretical virtues. The case I discuss in this paper, however, is a case in which there was one theory which was more virtuous than all its competitors. In such cases practitioners' disparate weighting preferences, which Kuhn is so keen to emphasize, make no difference to theory choice: practitioners' choices will converge on one theory despite their different weighting preferences. The case I discuss in this paper concerns the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam (GWS) model of electroweak interactions in the early 1970s. After considering the contemporary experimental evidence in its favor in detail, I argue that the GWS model was chosen not because the evidence in its favor was compelling, but rather because its virtues exceeded those of its competitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I challenge Gareth Eaton's recent claim that Theodore Richards should be counted among the discoverers of isotopes. In evaluating Eaton's claim, I draw on two influential theories of scientific discovery, one developed by Thomas Kuhn, and one developed by Augustine Brannigan. I argue that though Richards' experimental work contributed to the discovery, his work does not warrant attributing the discovery to him. Richards' reluctance to acknowledge isotopes is well document. Further, the fact that he made no claim to having made the discovery also undermines Eaton's argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most critical ideas to bridge the theoretical and historiographical domains is the paradigm concept. From Thomas Kuhn's highly influential studies on the history and philosophy of science in the 1960s, the paradigm concept was taken up in most if not all disciplinary discourses by the late 1970s and early 1980s, archaeology included. Historically, it provided a framework within which to understand the development of disciplinary questions; theoretically, it was used to frame what were considered to be deeply incompatible philosophies of archaeology, most notably expressed in the processual-postprocessual wars of the 1980s. Now that the dust of these wars has settled however, now that we have had numerous expressions of a consensual pluralism, is the paradigm concept still useful? This paper aims to take a new look at the paradigm concept, and explore it in relation to the intersection of historiography and theoretical debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the nature of the academic field of finance as it looks in the early 21st century. Using Kuhn’s structure of scientific revolutions as a framework, the paper examines the development of the field over the last 50 years with particular emphasis on intellectual shifts in the last decade: shifts emanating from cross-disciplinary research that are manifesting in approaches at odds with the traditional rational expectations paradigm. These approaches are based on previously disparate fields, such as psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and sociology. By critically examining the nature of the new approaches, the article determines whether they indeed offer ‘alternative’ paradigms as claimed. In light of the variation of these new approaches, the paper also makes a case for finance to engage more meaningfully in dialogue on epistemological issues and engage in self-appraisal as a force for change and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When read as a theory that is supposed to mirror, represent or fit some collection of historical data, critics argue that Kuhn's theory of paradigm shift in Structure of Scientific Revolutions fails by cherry-picking and underdetermination. When read as the ground for a socio-epistemological conception of rationality, critics argue that Kuhn's theory fails by either the naturalistic fallacy or underarticulation. This paper suggests that we need not view Structure as a historian's attempt to accurately depict scientific theory change or a philosopher's attempt to suggest, more normatively, the factors we ought to consider in theory choice. Instead, we might use Kuhn's theory as a metaphilosophical frame through which to better understand the limits of otherwise intractable philosophical debates. We can focus on Kuhn's theory not as a proposition or model to confirm, but as something we might use as a tool for understanding. Philosophers have discussed the justice and care orientations in ethics as two theories for which there will be some common, constraining set of intuitions to confirm one theory over the other, to demonstrate that protecting rights is fundamentally more valuable that fulfilling needs or that fulfilling needs is fundamentally more valuable that protecting rights. Instead of conceptualizing this conversation as a choice between two theories, this paper looks to Ian Hacking's interpretation of Kuhn's paradigm concept to suggest that working in the world of justice is very different than working in the world of care, as each orientation is a paradigm with its own cognitive and contextual standards of theory assessment. To start, after Larry Laudan, each has its own ontology, methodology, aims and values. But moreover, after Ian Hacking, each has an even larger, entrenched collection of projectible predicates. Though Carol Gilligan herself uses the metaphor of gestalt shift in a few places to characterize the move from the justice to the care perspective, the insight-that what many assume to be a standard exercise in theory choice is really more of a paradigm shift-has been under theorized by ethicists and ignored by philosophers of science. This paper brings the full resources of Structure and its secondary literature to this metaethical issue, while making the larger point that Structure has an important pragmatic role to play, when it comes to the understanding philosophical debates, even if we cannot secure the truth of Kuhn's theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History & Foundations of Science is the property of Universidad del Pais Vasco, Servicio Editorial and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper argues that Ludwik Fleck's concepts of thought collectives and proto-ideas are surprisingly topical to tackle some conceptual challenges in analyzing contemporary innovation. The objective of this paper is twofold: First, it strives to establish Ludwik Fleck as an important classic on the map of innovation analysis. A systematic comparison with Thomas Kuhn's work on paradigms, a concept highly influential in various branches of innovation studies, suggests a number of pronounced yet under-researched advantages of a Fleckian perspective in the context of technological change and innovation. Secondly, the paper links these advantages to some recent changes in the organization of innovation. Due to the rising pervasiveness of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), configurational innovation has become commonplace that cuts across the boundaries of established trajectories of knowledge generation. Fleck's graded understanding of the closedness of thought collectives and his weak notion of incommensurability provide powerful metaphors to grasp the peculiarities of configurational innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In his account of scientific revolutions, Thomas Kuhn suggests that after a revolutionary change of theory, it is as if scientists are working in a different world. In this paper, we aim to show that the notion of world change is insightful. We contrast the reporting of the discovery of neon in 1898 with the discovery of hafnium in 1923. The one discovery was made when elements were identified by their atomic weight; the other discovery was made after scientists came to classify elements by their atomic number. By considering two instances of the reporting of the discovery of a new chemical element 25 years apart, we argue that it becomes clear how chemists can be said to have been responding to different worlds as a result of the change in the concept of a chemical element. They (1) saw, (2) did, and (3) reported different things as they conducted their research on the new chemical elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kuhn's account of scientific change is characterized by an internal tension between a naturalist vein, which is compatible with the revolutionary perspective on the historical development of science, and an aprioristic or Kantian vein which wants to secure that science is not an irrational enterprise. Kuhn himself never achieved to resolve the tension or even to deal with the terms of the problem. Michael Friedman, quite recently, provided an account which aspires to reconcile the revolutionary and the aprioristic elements of the Kuhnian historiography by placing the latter in the neo-Kantian philosophical framework. In this paper, I suggest that Friedman manages to provide a convincing description of the structuration of scientific knowledge and, further, to present science as a rational enterprise. I argue that despite these virtues Friedman's account faces a major problem with regard to the context of transcendental idealism which he is not willing to abandon. I also argue that discarding transcendental idealism in the way the philosophical perspective of John McDowell does, we can dispose of the flaws of Friedman's account while retaining its virtues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexander Bird indicates that the significance of Thomas Kuhn in the history of philosophy of science is somehow paradoxical. On the one hand, Kuhn was one of the most influential and important philosophers of science in the second half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, nowadays there is little distinctively Kuhn's legacy in the sense that most of Kuhn's work has no longer any philosophical significance. Bird argues that the explanation of the paradox of Kuhn's legacy is that Kuhn took a direction opposite to that of the mainstream of the philosophy of science in his later academic career. This paper aims to provide a new way to understand and develop Kuhn's legacy by revisiting the development of Kuhn's philosophy of science in 1970s and proposing a new account of exemplar. Firstly, I propose my diagnosis of Kuhn's "wrong turning" by identifying Kuhn's two novel contributions: the introduction of paradigm and the proposal of the incommensurability thesis. Secondly, I argue that Kuhn made a conceptual/terminological turn from paradigm to theory, which undermined Kuhn's novel contributions. Thirdly, I propose a new articulation of exemplar and propose an exemplar-based approach to analysing the history of science. Finally, I show how the exemplar-based approach can be applied to analyse the history of science by my case study of the early development of genetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn famously argued that scientific revolutions consist in paradigm shifts in which the superseded and the new paradigms are incommensurable. My aim in this paper is to show that neither Kuhn's examples nor Yafeng Shan's recently proposed example adequately support this incommensurability thesis. Starting from the distinction between global and local incommensurability, I argue that, on the one hand, local incommensurability does not imply that paradigms are globally incommensurable, and, on the other, that it is likely that real support for Kuhn's thesis that "the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds" requires global incommensurabilities. Thus, I argue that the Kuhnian view is not capable of providing satisfactory evidence that those incommensurabilities ever occurred in the history of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thesis of this paper contends that many sociologists who have attempted to apply Kuhn's argument in analyzing the status of sociology have misunderstood, or have refused to accept, the central meaning of his paradigm concept. In this paper we first clarify the notion of paradigm as explicated by Kuhn and by Margaret Masterman, and note that the "exemplar" is the central element in the concept. We then analyze the usage of the concept by sociologists who have attempted to ascertain the paradigmatic status of sociology and we focus in particular on the work of Friedrichs and that of Ritzer. In so doing, we show that they have concentrated almost exclusively on the less important, more general meanings of the paradigm concept and thus lose the major thrust of Kuhn's argument. Possible reasons for this misuse are discussed. Finally, we argue that sociology has relatively few exemplars, lacks a clear-cut puzzle-solving tradition, and tends to operate from discipline-wide perspectives. In this regard, sociology is not a mature science; attempts to treat it as such within Kuhn's framework are misdirected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper analyzes the nature and consequences of paradigms in tourism studies. It is somewhat unconventional in that its co-authors have not sought to produce a synthesized finished product. Rather, they have rendered their different perspectives visible through the structuring of the paper as a trialogue. It commences with Tribe's thesis that tourism studies is not governed by a restrictive paradigm at the field level but that at a societal level neoliberalism may be viewed as a restricting paradigm. Jamal and Dann then each deepen and extend the analysis of the term 'paradigm' as they engage with the thesis providing sometimes confirmatory and sometimes conflicting analyses. A final round of clarifications and comment concludes the piece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses essential elements of the philosophical works of Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961) and their potential interpretation for the teaching and learning of science. In the early twentieth century, Fleck made substantial contributions to understanding the sociological character of the nature of science and explaining the embedding of science in society. His works have several parallels to the later and very popular work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn, although Kuhn only indirectly referred to the influence of Fleck on his own theories. Starting from a short review of the life of Ludwik Fleck, his philosophical work and its connections to Kuhn, this paper elaborates upon and illustrates how his theories can be considered for science education in order to provide learners with a better understanding of the nature of scientific endeavor and the bi-directional science-to-society links. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the nations of the world, serious attention is now being paid to the environment because of the increase in environmental disasters. Most of these disasters are not natural but as a consequence of the activities of human beings and their science including their technological apparatuses and deployments. Issues such as global warming, climate change, flooding, desertification, air, water and land pollutions, deforestation, wild fires among so many debilitating issues that affect the environment today have become a source of concern to world leaders, environmentalists, philosophers and other concerned individuals. But the question is; what is the cause of the increase in environmental disasters? Is anything being done to change the narrative? Are the 'ordinary people' aware of the impact of their use and enjoyment of science and technology on the environment? Who takes the lead in shifting the paradigm? Thomas Kuhn had opined in his magnus-opus -- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that every paradigm has relevance in the age to which it is accepted and practiced by the scientific community. But a time will come when anomalies would begin to be noticed in accepted paradigms. These anomalies will lead to crisis that will finally lead to a shift in paradigm thus heralding a scientific revolution. A shift in paradigm means a deliberate departure from the old way of doing things in other to face new challenges that may have been caused by the former way things were done. Using the analytic and critical methods, this paper attempts to situate the impact of science and technology and the activities of the ordinary people on the environment. The Kuhnian notion of 'paradigm shift' shall be adopted as a framework to establish a workable panacea to change the narrative. The idea is to canvas for a paradigm shift in the management of the environment by co-opting 'ordinary people' to participate in shifting the environmental paradigm of this age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postmodernism is like a spectre hunting the intellectual world, and there is a sense in which the attitude is, first and foremost, against modern science. This essay is, therefore, an expository analysis of the thoughts of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, as classical representations of the postmodern reaction against modern science. The paper argues that the colossal image of science, as well as the idea of a "unity of sciences" had to be jettisoned by postmodernism in order to make way for the relativism and multiplicity of points of view that are symptomatic of postmodern thinking. The paper concludes with some critical reflections of the thoughts of the two scholars, and notes that postmodernism opened the door for the recognition of African ideas and ideals. The implication is that postmodernism not only vitiates the hold exercised by Western European models of reality but equally gives fresh cultural confidence to other modes of cognition, especially in Africa, that have long been pushed to the periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops two sets of concepts to theorize why students engage differently in Geographical Information Systems (GIS). These theoretical concepts are used as an analytical lens to explore empirical data on the experiences and engagement of students enrolled in an undergraduate GIS course in planning and management. The analysis shows that both the theoretical perspectives and the custom and didactical contract are important to understand students' engagement in GIS. However, it is the personal desiderata that are the key to understanding the students' different engagement. Further, a temporal dimension and contextual awareness are important in understanding students' engagement in a broader perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

My response to Ona Lindquist's paper, “What a blackbird told me is real and alive” opens with an appreciation of her use of a lyric, poetic approach in presenting the benefits for psychoanalysts in reading and writing poetry by opening the mind to unconscious currents. Having written and published my own poetry since 1965 and having been trained as a psychoanalyst and practiced psychoanalysis since 1982, I attest to the beneficial values that each of these practices has on the other. I also recognize the value of Lindquist's open discussion of her own analysis. I then go on to discuss Lindquist's assertion that she practices psychoanalysis more as an art than a science, particularly in terms of the issue of art and narcissism, citing Freud, Heinz Kohut, and Christopher Lasch. I also suggest that psychoanalysis might be more usefully understood as a science that employs elements of artistic creativity, and finally cite Thomas Kuhn's contention in The structure of scientific revolutions that “when… the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice... then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]