What he did do was provide some classic examples of the term that were sufficiently unprecedented to attract adherents away from more mundane alternatives, but sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of possibilities for others to explore.
Of course, Kuhn can't be blamed single-handedly for the way paradigm - and its shiftier cousin - have propagated in popular culture. But for our purposes, Masterson's analysis sheds light on two questions that turn out to be related: what Kuhn meant by paradigm in the first place, and how a single word managed to assume such a broad and expansive set of meanings after being unleashed by Kuhn's book. In the end, Masterson distills Kuhn's 21 senses of paradigm into a more respectable three, and she identifies what she sees as both novel and important aspects of Kuhn's "paradigm view" of science. Is there, philosophically speaking, anything definite or general about the notion of a paradigm which Kuhn is trying to make clear? Or is he just a historian-poet describing different happenings which have occurred in the course of the history of science, and referring to them all by using the same word "paradigm"? She identified 21 distinct senses in which Kuhn used the term paradigm. In a paper published in 1970, Margaret Masterson presented a careful reading of Kuhn's 1962 book. It turns out this question is hard to answer - not because paradigm has an especially technical or obscure definition, but because it has many. But do they capture what Kuhn actually had in mind in developing an account of scientific change? More than 50 years after Kuhn's famous book, these definitions may seem intuitive rather than technical.
DEFINITION OF A PARADIGM SHIFT SERIES
Inspired, in part, by the theories of psychologist Jean Piaget, who saw children's development as a series of discrete stages marked by periods of transition, Kuhn posited two kinds of scientific change: incremental developments in the course of what he called "normal science," and scientific revolutions that punctuate these more stable periods. One measure of his influence is the widespread use of the term "paradigm shift," which he introduced in articulating his views about how science changes over time.
But his influence extended well beyond the academy: The book was widely read - and seeped into popular culture. Kuhn's 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, transformed the philosophy of science and changed the way many scientists think about their work. He went on to become an important and broad-ranging thinker, and one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. Thomas Kuhn, the well-known physicist, philosopher and historian of science, was born 94 years ago today.
0 kommentar(er)
