Stephen Downes

This a substantial revision of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on Thomas Kuhn and is recommended reading if you're interested in the philosophy of science and theory change. The article stresses (correxctly) that "as far as the history of science and science studies more generally are concerned, Kuhn repudiated at least the more radical developments made in his name," especially including the doctrine of incommensurability. Specifically, "Kuhn wanted to reject the kind of 'convergent' realism that took science to be aiming at providing, ultimately, an unified, accurate, and complete description of a (largely) human-independent natural world, a task at which it is held to be increasingly successful. On the other hand he rejected the extreme relativism according to which there is no measure by which one could say that science is progressing." A scientific theory or paradigm, he would argue, is rather more than just a 'point of view' or 'lens' through which to look at the world. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was (ironically) first published in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science.