Reconsidering the Carnap-Kuhn Connection

Tsou, Jonathan Y.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-13383-6_5

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 69 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Oliveira (2007), on the contrary, defends that these similarities are a sign that Carnap had already abandoned the main tenets of logical positivism. See also Uebel (2011), Oliveira (2015), and Tsou (2015). 4 In Structure, Kuhn was "unsure whether these psychological results showed how the mind worked in general, both in perceptual cases and in scientific thinking, or whether they merely provided an analogy for the operation of paradigms" (Bird, 2002, p. 448).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

From Empirical Evidence to First Principles

Pirozelli

2020

Veritas

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions represented a milestone in the attempt to understand scientific development based on empirical observations. However, in the next decades after the publication of his book, history, psychology, and sociology became increasingly marginal in Kuhn’s discussions. In his last articles, Kuhn even suggested that philosophers should pay less attention to empirical data and focus more on “first principles.” The purpose of this article is, first, to describe this radical transformation in Kuhn’s methodological approach, from his initial naturalism to his later and more strict philosophical stance. Next, I present some of the alleged justifications for explaining this transition, such as his interest in problems more firmly attached to the philosophical tradition and a desire for greater acceptance within this community. Although these factors certainly played a role in explaining Kuhn’s change, I also believe that an important theoretical component exerts a fundamental function in this transition: the idea that scientific development is a kind of evolutionary process, which is better understood through the use of abstract theoretical models, instead of sparse observations of scientific activity.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

From Empirical Evidence to First Principles

Pirozelli

2020

Veritas

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Kuhn and Philosophy

Kindi

2024

Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Thomas Kuhn and Science Education

Matthews

2022

Sci & Educ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Reconsidering the Carnap-Kuhn Connection

Cited by 5 publications

References 69 publications

From Empirical Evidence to First Principles

From Empirical Evidence to First Principles

Kuhn and Philosophy

Thomas Kuhn and Science Education

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About