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Vision and Revolution: A Postscript on Kuhn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Israel Scheffler
Israel Scheffler*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

In Chapter 4 of Science and Subjectivity, I offered several arguments critical of Professor Thomas Kuhn's views as expressed in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His recent replies to these criticisms seem to me so inadequate as to suggest that he, and therefore others as well, may have failed to grasp their full import. Accordingly, I shall, in the first part of this paper, briefly recapitulate my earlier arguments and offer a short rejoinder to Professor Kuhn's replies. The second part of the paper will expand upon my earlier discussion to consider the basic metaphors of vision and revolution, offered by Kuhn to replace the traditional notion of deliberation. My argument here will be that these new metaphors are incongruous in critical respects, and my discussion will conclude by considering their relations to the contrast between understanding and accepting a theory.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , September 1972 , pp. 366 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 by The Philosophy of Science Association

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References

1 Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1967).

2 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1962). Because of the numerous citations in the present paper, page references to passages in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions will hereafter be given directly following quoted portions in the text, enclosed within parentheses. Note that all such references are to the first edition of 1962, rather than to the second edition of 1970.

3 In the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1970, “Postscript-1969,” pp. 174–210; and in “Reflections on my Critics” in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 231–278).

4 I do not offer a comprehensive examination of Kuhn's replies to his critics, however. Dudley Shapere, in “The Paradigm Concept,” Science 172 (1971): 706 ff., reviews the general effect of Kuhn's recent replies in a discussion I find persuasive.

5 Science and Subjectivity, op. cit. Hereafter, page references to this book will be given directly in the text, prefixed by the letters “SS,” and enclosed in parentheses. (Note that parenthesized page references without the prefix “SS” always refer to Kuhn's first edition, as explained above in footnote 2.)

6 I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, op. cit., p. 261.

7 Ibid., p. 262.

8 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second edition, p. 186.

9 For a discussion of Kuhn's replies relating also to other issues, see Shapere's review “The Paradigm Concept”, op. cit., (footnote 4 above).

10 Compare K. R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1945, Third edition (revised) 1957), Chapters 7 and 8.