Paradigms: Thomas Kuhn
by The goal of this paper is, as suggested by its title, to provide a comprehensive critical discussion of Kuhn’s thesis which says that the scientific progress is not cumulative. Therefore the main topic may be introduced by asking “When, how and why did the change occur?”.
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“When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, …when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.”
Thomas S. Kuhn – “The Essential Tension” (pp.xii)
The goal of this paper is, as suggested by its title, to provide a comprehensive critical discussion of Kuhn’s thesis which says that the scientific progress is not cumulative. Therefore the main topic may be introduced by asking “When, how and why did the change occur?”. But before we broach these fundamental questions, it will be worthwhile first to make ourselves familiar with the historical framework of Kuhn’s philosophical development.
Thomas Samuel Kuhn, born in 1922, is an American philosopher and historian of science. He studied physics at Harvard University and worked first as a physicist. He became interested in the historical development of science in 1947, when he was asked to prepare a set of lectures on the origins of seventeenth-century mechanics. For this purpose, Kuhn tells us, he had to interrupt his current physics project and start research in order to discover what the predecessors of Galileo and Newton had known about the subject. The discussions of motion in Aristotle’s Physica came as a natural consequence of his preliminary inquiries. But the questions of “How much about mechanics was known within the Aristotelian tradition?” and “How much was left for seventeenth-century scientists to discover?” were posed in a Newtonian vocabulary and, as a consequence, in order to get clear answers they demanded answers in the same terms.
That is to say that Kuhn approached the text like most earlier historians of science did. And seen from this perspective, what Aristotelians had had to say about mechanics seemed to be wrong. The immediate consequences of this view was that no such tradition could have provided a foundation for the work of Galileo and his contemporaries. However, further research on Aristotele’s work revealed that his interpretation of phenomena had often been profound when dealing with subjects other than physics. Therefore, inevitably, Kuhn asked himself how Aristotele’s thinking failed him so when applied to motion and, “how could he have said about it so many apparently absurd things?”
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