Thomas Kuhns Account Of The Nature Of Science
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Philosophy of Science

Date : 11/11/2022

Philosophy of ScienceThomas Kuhn s account of the nature of science

Although Thomas Kuhn is best known for his philosophical career, he first started as a physicist. Soon after joining Harvard, an opportunity presented itself, where he could dive into the study of history of science. Given his scientific background, this quickly stuck with him and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution, detailing the great medieval revolution in astronomy, that changed the world from a geocentric position to a heliocentric one. Thus, Thomas Kuhn entered the time of his life which was going to make him famous and change the philosophical community forever. He is considered to be perhaps the most influential philosopher of the 20th century, primarily because of the views he published with his 1962 book: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Bird et al. 2018). His views on scientific revolutions have also propagated the wave of revolution and change in the philosophy of science, by marking the break with key positivist doctrines (Bird et al. 2018) and opening the door to a new philosophical approach that was in closer contact with the history of science. As a man who enjoyed the study of history, it is no surprise that his views were directly linked to how scientific theories change over time, how they evolve and die off (just to be replaced by the newest interpretation of the world).Compared with some of the most renowned predecessors, like Hume, Popper or Carnap, who were focused on the debate regarding the realism and rationality of scientific knowledge, Kuhn argued that science is both non-inductive and non-rational (Ladyman et al. 2002, page 96). His account of the development of scientific knowledge proposed that science undergoes periods of stable growth disrupted only by revisionary revolutions, that overthrow past theories in a cyclical fashion (Bird et al. 2018). Therefore, on the Copernican revolution and the battle between superstition and myth (Earth as the centre of the universe as created by God), Kuhn argued that out-of-date beliefs [ ] can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge , showing thus the impermanence of scientific theories and highlighting the trap that each generation can fall into by assuming their interpretation of the world is the most true. Kuhn goes on and argues that abandoned beliefs are not thereby unscientific and that the history of science does not consist in the steady accumulation of knowledge, but often involves the wholesale abandonment of past theories (Ladyman et al. 2002, page 97). With this argument, Kuhn has permanently altered the perception on scientific knowledge as it brings forward the question: how reliable and objective is our knowledge of the world? He also opened up the debate over historical circumstances and their influence on our acceptance or rejection of a theory and planted the seed of doubt on whether we might reject otherwise good theories because of the social context we live in (from history of science we know that religion and inquisition have played a major role in what views of the heavens were acceptable to hold and what not). He also underlined the importance of the relationship between theory and observation and claimed that theories infect data to such an extent that no way of gathering of observations can ever be theory-neutral and objective (Ladyman et al. 2002, page 98). If we are to believe his claim, then the degree of confirmation an experiment gives to a hypothesis is not objective and there is no testing [ ] that can be used to determine which theory is most justified by evidence (Ladyman et al. 2002, page 98). This poses a major problem for any scientist and any advancements in science, as without subjectivity for or against a theory there would be just stagnation. But does it mean we choose the right path? Or are we just blindly flowing with whatever seems the most attractive theory at the time? Kuhn s answer to this, points in the direction of psychological preferences (values) of the scientists who make the theoretical proposals and the scientific community who finally accepts or rejects them.Since Kuhn s theories are subjected to the influence of the social context and they affect the type of data that is gathered and how this is processed, we can already establish that there is a problem if one tries to compare scientific knowledge from the Copernican era to 21st century astronomical knowledge. To this view, Kuhn pointed the term of incommensurability , which suggests that theories from differing periods suffer from certain deep kinds of failure of comparability (Bird et al 2018). This means that we cannot talk about scientific theories of the past as being unscientific or worthless and that these should be judged only in the context of the time they lived through and of the community that nourished and kept them alive. Probably the most important concept in Kuhn s thesis on the scientific revolutions is the idea of scientific paradigm. Although there is no given definition to his chosen term, there have been identified two closely related applications of it: paradigm as disciplinary matrix and paradigm as exemplar. The disciplinary matrix refers to the set of knowledge acquired by new scientists in the course of their studies, which will provide the framework within which they conduct the science. On the other hand, the exemplar refers to those successful outcomes of science that all new scientists refer to and which provides them with a similar model for the future development of science. What this means is that new scientists are bound from the start of their education to follow the same rules and the same steps into developing the scientific knowledge as their predecessors. When this routine is set in place, the time for normal science begins, as Kuhn called it, which is the time when science is a fairly conservative activity and scientists do not question the fundamental principles of their discipline (Ladyman et al. 2002, page 100). Therefore, as long as the paradigm is successful in making progress in solving problems and extending its empirical applications, then most scientists will just assume that anomalies [ ] will eventually be resolved (Ladyman et al. 2002, page 101). Hence, nothing changes during the period of normal science and the same paradigm (set of accepted theories about the world) is used for the quest of advancing science. However, once a number of serious anomalies accumulate, scientists start to question the validity and truthfulness of the paradigm and often, the most eccentric young scientists bring about the paradigm shift - a new way of thinking about the world (Ladyman et al. 2002, page 100). Such a crisis in the scientific community happens rarely and the paradigm shift needs to be robust enough to accommodate all the phenomena from the old domain, plus to solve the anomalies which were previously encountered. If the new paradigm holds strong and is accepted by the community, then a scientific revolution has occurred. Overall, in Kuhn s view, the scientific revolution is its own unique interpretation of the scientific change, because it involves a holistic change in the scientific theories. In other words, when a paradigm shift happens, the scientific theories experience a wholesale shift to a new way of thinking about the world, and this will usually mean a new way of practicing science as well as including new experimental techniques (Ladyman et al. 2002, page 103). Thus, we have seen that Thomas Kuhn s thesis has focused on the evolution of scientific theories and knowledge, from a different angle than proposed before him and suggested that sometimes old theories are completely abandoned in light of new discoveries or new ways of thinking about the world and that the change in scientific theory is not linear but rather cyclical, with periods of monotony and periods of growth and change, that represent the paradigm shift. The cyclical representation of Thomas Kuhn, as illustrated below, implies that each paradigm shift is bound to bring a new paradigm shift some time in the future. This idea is somehow unsettling for the scientific community as although it offers the scientists a purpose by claiming a continuous growth and development for a subject it also shows that we cannot entirely trust any set of theories at any given time to hold on the ultimate truth about the world.

BibliographyBird, Alexander, "Thomas Kuhn", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N.Zalta (ed.),https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/thomas-kuhnLadyman, J.,2002. Understanding Philosophy of Science, London: Routledge.

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