A must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century.  This book contains the text of Thomas S. Kuhn’s unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the problems that it raised but did not resolve. The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper “Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product” and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, “The Presence of Past Science.” An introduction by the editor describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds and sheds light on its central philosophical problems.  Kuhn’s aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. In his view, incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of the real world that science investigates, the rationality of scientific change, and the idea that scientific development is progressive.  
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Editor’s Introduction Editor’s Note Thomas S. Kuhn: Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product Abstract for “The Presence of Past Science (The Shearman Memorial Lectures)” Thomas S. Kuhn: The Presence of Past Science (The Shearman Memorial Lectures)     Lecture I: Regaining the Past     Lecture II: Portraying the Past     Lecture III: Embodying the Past Abstract for The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development Thomas S. Kuhn: The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development     Acknowledgments     Part I: The Problem         Chapter 1: Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product         Chapter 2: Breaking into the Past         Chapter 3: Taxonomy and Incommensurability     Part II: A World of Kinds         Chapter 4: Biological Prerequisites to Linguistic Description: Track and Situations         Chapter 5: Natural Kinds: How Their Names Mean         Chapter 6: Practices, Theories, and Artefactual Kinds Bibliography Editor’s Acknowledgments Notes Index
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“A fascinating sketch of Kuhn’s mature thought. . . . The proponents of competing paradigms may practice their trades in different worlds, but, as Kuhn was at pains to stress in his last writings, sometimes those worlds are closer than we think.”
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Excerpt to come.

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780226833316
Publisert
2024-05-08
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Chicago Press
Vekt
481 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Dybde
23 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
312

Forfatter
Redaktør

Om bidragsyterne

Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–96) was an American philosopher and the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, he wrote many books, including The Copernican Revolution, The Essential Tension, and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912, all also published by the University of Chicago Press. Bojana Mladenović is professor of philosophy at Williams College. She is the author of Kuhn’s Legacy: Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, and Pragmatism