Scientific change: Philosophical models and historical research

Laudan, Larry; Donovan, Arthur; Laudan, Rachel; Barker, Peter; Brown, Harold I.; Leplin, Jarrett; Thagard, Paul; Wykstra, Steve

doi:10.1007/bf00413981

Cited by 193 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Historians of science have formulated various primary explanations of the origins and evolution of paradigms (Guntau & Laitko, 1991), including accounts that emphasize purely philosophical and intellectual (Laudan et al, 1986), deliberative (Czubaroff, 1989), rhetorical (Prelli, 1989), sociological and political (Lynch, 1992;Merton, 1973), and constructionist and pragmatic (Knorr-Cetina, 1999) processes. An alternative account to either a pure realist or constructionist source of paradigmatic speciation would be to view continuous theory innovation, reformulation and paradigmatic practice as a by-product of an elaborate epistemic and political game.…”

Section: Of Paradigms and Fairy Talesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Framing the Game: An Architectonic Analogue for Meta-Theorizing Academic Activities

Spitzberg

2018

SMC

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A radical reformulation is proposed for explaining paradigm fragmentation. The broader topography of academic activities is conceptualized according to an academic game-theoretic analogue (GTA). According to this analogue, scholarly and academic activities reflect a competitive field of play and of plays. Criteria such as attention, compensation, awards, publications, tenure, and mobility become the scarce valued resources distributed in the game based on the plays that players enact. In an effort to reveal the heuristic potential of the theoretical analogy, these threads are traced across a broad array of humanistic and scientific theories and scholarship, including connections among Wittgenstein, Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Goffman, Foucault, Bourdieu and Lyotard. The field of Communication, and its many affiliated and cognate disciplines have been charted by a wide variety of paradigm maps (e.g., Altman & Rogoff, 1987;Anderson & Baym, 2004;Craig, 1999;Smith, 1988). There is little doubt that the communication discipline is fragmented, multi-faceted and complex (Barnett, Huh, Kim, & Park, 2011, p. 467). In fields such as communication (Eadie, 2011;Salomón, 2010;Stanfill, 2012), sociology (Puddephatt & McLaughlin, 2015), political science (Blokland, 2015) and social psychology (Green, 2015), such fragmentation has been singled out as a threat to their disciplinary status and credibility. This analysis suggests an explanation for scholarly activities that provide the raw data for such variegated maps. The analogy of game theory provides a high-level explanation for academic and scholarly activities, and provides a meta-account of the raison d'etre of scholarly activity, which is to pursue such activity while seldom recognizing its game-like nature.Disciplinary paradigms appear to be organic, ever-evolving systems of people and ideas. Kuhn (1970) proposed that paradigms may consist of very small groups, even as small as a dozen or two members, who share either similar exemplars or collective practices and beliefs. Scholarly activities are sense-making activities and language communities. As paradigms evolve, scholars often engage in sense-making to organize such paradigms along dimensions and boundaries that reflect the respective relationships among such paradigms (Foucault, 1988). Maps of these relationships represent meta-sense-making activities of these academic territories. Granting that -the map is not the territory‖ (Korzybski, 1931, p. 58), meta-theoretical paradigm maps are intended to bring order to the diversity of academic and scholarly activities that constitute a discipline (Charland, 2003;Wang, 2014). These organizing efforts reflect 

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Section: Of Paradigms and Fairy Talesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Framing the Game: An Architectonic Analogue for Meta-Theorizing Academic Activities

Spitzberg

2018

SMC

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“…Each paradigm offers a conceptual framework, attributes empirical laws to the physical reality, models in concrete ways the physical phenomena, imposes constraints on these, as well as to the acceptable error margins within each paradigm and is characterized by its historical evolution within the passage of time (Kuhn, 1996;1977). These aspects can be classified according to the underlying mathematical structures of the paradigm, the empirical claims posed by it, the function of its theoretical terms, the role of the approximations undertaken and considered, the internal evolution of its structure and the inter-theoretic relations within its corpus (Laudan, 1986).…”

Section: The Overall Aspects Of the Astronomical Paradigmsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Criteria for the Complexity of Successive Astronomical Paradigms

Papaspirou¹,

Karamanos

Moussas³

2014

Physics International

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We investigate the complexity of three successive astronomical paradigms in the science of Physics, namely the Ptolemaic paradigm, the Copernican paradigm and the Keplerian paradigm and mention briefly some characteristic facts about the colossal Newtonian paradigm. This complexity can be understood according to five criteria, as proposed by Thomas Kuhn, the father of the epistemological notion of the paradigm, as well as the founder of an important epistemological school within the realm of the 20th century. We propose that there does not exists an overall formal criterion for deciding among these rival paradigms, that is of the existing astronomical paradigms at the age Johannes Kepler formulated its own breakthrough within the science of Astronomy. The further evolution of the science of Astronomy, as well as the advent of the telescope era for investigating the celestial phenomena surely decided for the Newtonian paradigm, which can be understood as the epitome of all past astronomical and cosmological paradigms, yet the advance of the scientific study of the celestial phenomena did not evolved within a linear fashion, on the other hand, it has undergone many changes, subject to the great historical turns, that is the eras of the mentioned astronomical paradigms, during their evolution and their abandonment from the scientific community of the astronomers, the scholars and the polymaths of their age, respectively. We propose that each of Thomas Kuhn criteria imposes its own "complexity measure" of these paradigms, while the overall complexity criterion has to be regarded as the accumulating, overwhelming, empirical evidence, for finally deciding the new way of evolution and the novel turn within the science of Astronomy, especially in the post-Keplerian and surely in the post-Newtonian era.

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“…Which model is the right one? According to Larry Laudan and his co-workers (see Laudan et al, 1986Laudan et al, , 1988Laudan, 1987), a more rigorous historical approach is needed to answer such critical questions. For this purpose, they propose their 'testing-theories-of-scientific-change programme'.…”

Section: Testing Theories Of Scientific Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Philosophy and history of science: Beyond the Kuhnian paradigm

Radder

1997

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

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Scientific change: Philosophical models and historical research

Cited by 193 publications

References 6 publications

Framing the Game: An Architectonic Analogue for Meta-Theorizing Academic Activities

Framing the Game: An Architectonic Analogue for Meta-Theorizing Academic Activities

Criteria for the Complexity of Successive Astronomical Paradigms

Philosophy and history of science: Beyond the Kuhnian paradigm

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