Kuhns Evolutionary Social Epistemology

Download or read book Kuhn's Evolutionary Social Epistemology written by K. Brad Wray and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-29 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) has been enduringly influential in philosophy of science, challenging many common presuppositions about the nature of science and the growth of scientific knowledge. However, philosophers have misunderstood Kuhn's view, treating him as a relativist or social constructionist. In this book, Brad Wray argues that Kuhn provides a useful framework for developing an epistemology of science that takes account of the constructive role that social factors play in scientific inquiry. He examines the core concepts of Structure and explains the main characteristics of both Kuhn's evolutionary epistemology and his social epistemology, relating Structure to Kuhn's developed view presented in his later writings. The discussion includes analyses of the Copernican revolution in astronomy and the plate tectonics revolution in geology. The book will be useful for scholars working in science studies, sociologists and historians of science as well as philosophers of science.

Download or read book Kuhn's Legacy written by Bojana Mladenović and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Its influence reaches far beyond the philosophy of science, and its key terms, such as “paradigm shift,” “normal science,” and “incommensurability,” are now used in both academic and public discourse without any reference to Kuhn. However, Kuhn’s philosophy is still often misunderstood and underappreciated. In Kuhn’s Legacy, Bojana Mladenović offers a novel analysis of Kuhn’s central philosophical project, focusing on his writings after Structure. Mladenović argues that Kuhn’s historicism was always coupled with a firm and consistent antirelativism but that it was only in his mature writings that Kuhn began to systematically develop an original account of scientific rationality. She reconstructs this account, arguing that Kuhn sees the rationality of science as a form of collective rationality. At the purely formal level, Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality prohibits obviously irrational beliefs and choices and requires reason-responsiveness as well as the uninterrupted pursuit of inquiry. At the substantive, historicized level, it rests on a distinctly pragmatist mode of justification compatible with a notion of contingent but robust scientific progress. Mladenović argues that Kuhn’s epistemology and his metaphilosophy both represent a creative and fruitful continuation of the tradition of American pragmatism. Kuhn’s Legacy demonstrates the vitality of Kuhn’s philosophical project and its importance for the study of the philosophy and history of science today.

Download or read book Interpreting Kuhn written by K. Brad Wray and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-08 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One might wonder if there is anything new to say about Thomas Kuhn and his views on science. Scholarship on Kuhn, though, has changed dramatically in the last 20 years. This is so for a number reasons"--

Download or read book Knowledge and Inquiry written by K. Brad Wray and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2002-05-23 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology focuses on three areas in the theory of knowledge: epistemic justification; analyses of knowledge and scepticism; and recent developments in epistemology. Each of the three sections includes a brief introduction to the readings, a series of study questions, and a list of suggested readings. Section 1 deals with coherentism, foundationalism, reliabilism, and includes articles by Chisholm, BonJour, Audi, Goldman, and Fumerton. Section 2 deals with the analysis of knowledge and Gettier problems, and a variety of forms and responses to scepticism; it includes articles by Gettier, Conee, Feldman, Putnam, Nagel, and Stroud. Section 3 introduces the reader to recent developments in naturalized, feminist, and social epistemology, and includes articles by Quine, Almeder, Putnam, Anderson, Harding, Longino, Hardwig, Rorty, and Kitcher.

Download or read book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions written by Thomas S. Kuhn and published by Chicago : University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1969 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Thomas Kuhn's Revolutions written by James A. Marcum and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of Thomas Kuhn's Revolution marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kuhn's most influential work. Drawing on the rich archival sources at MIT, and engaging fully with current scholarship, James Marcum provides the historical background to the development of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Exploring the shift Kuhn makes from a historical to an evolutionary philosophy of science and examining Kuhn's legacy in depth, Marcum answers key questions: What exactly was Kuhn's historiographic revolution and how did it come about? Why did it have the impact it did? What will its future impact be for both academia and society? Marcum's answers build a new portrait of Kuhn: his personality, his pedagogical style and the intellectual and social context in which he practiced his trade. Thomas Kuhn's Revolution shows how Kuhn transcends the boundaries of the philosophy of science, influencing sociologists, economists, theologians and even policy makers and politicians. This is a comprehensive historical and conceptual introduction to the man who changed our understanding of science.

Download or read book Mystery of Mysteries written by Lucyle T Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science Michael Ruse and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the recent Sokal hoax--the publication of a prominent physicist's pseudo-article in a leading journal of cultural studies--the status of science moved sharply from debate to dispute. Is science objective, a disinterested reflection of reality, as Karl Popper and his followers believed? Or is it subjective, a social construction, as Thomas Kuhn and his students maintained? Into the fray comes "Mystery of Mysteries," an enlightening inquiry into the nature of science, using evolutionary theory as a case study. Michael Ruse begins with such colorful luminaries as Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) and Julian Huxley (brother of novelist Aldous and grandson of T. H. Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog" ) and ends with the work of the English game theorist Geoffrey Parker--a microevolutionist who made his mark studying the mating strategies of dung flies--and the American paleontologist Jack Sepkoski, whose computer-generated models reconstruct mass extinctions and other macro events in life's history. Along the way Ruse considers two great popularizers of evolution, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, as well as two leaders in the field of evolutionary studies, Richard Lewontin and Edward O. Wilson, paying close attention to these figures' cultural commitments: Gould's transplanted Germanic idealism, Dawkins's male-dominated Oxbridge circle, Lewontin's Jewish background, and Wilson's southern childhood. Ruse explicates the role of metaphor and metavalues in evolutionary thought and draws significant conclusions about the cultural impregnation of science. Identifying strengths and weaknesses on both sides of the "science wars," he demonstrates that a resolution of the objective and subjective debate is nonetheless possible.