Abstract

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn expounded his main beliefs on the nature of science in a way that seemed for him, at least for a while, definitive. Yet, his writings before and after Structure, a significant part of them unpublished, do not support the claim that Structure exhausted those aspects of science and its development Kuhn had planned to entertain. Philosophical issues of scientific development attracted his attention a decade before a first draft of Structure was finished and around 8 years before he first started to write the first chapter. As a Harvard junior fellow, Kuhn explored those issues for the first time. Similarly, when he considered that his historiographical work on the archival and oral sources of quantum mechanics and on the history of the old quantum theory had been finished, he turned his attention again to philosophical aspects of scientific development from a new point of view. In this chapter, I shall try to show that the background to that new point of view was as old as his oldest texts on philosophy of science. That shall be one of my main goals in this paper.