Acknowledgements viii Acknowledgements for the Second Edition ix 1 The Scientific Revolution and the Historiography of Science 1 2 Renaissance and Revolution 9 3 The Scientific Method 14 The Mathematization of the World Picture 14 Experience and Experiment 30 4 Magic and the Origins of Modern Science 54 5 The Mechanical Philosophy 68 6 Religion and Science 85 7 Science and the Wider Culture 98 8 Conclusion 110 Bibliography 113 Glossary 139 Index 153.

This collection reconsiders canonical figures and the formation of disciplinary boundaries during the Scientific Revolution.

In his late years, Thomas Kuhn became interested in the process of scientific specialization, which does not seem to possess the destructive element that is characteristic of scientific revolutions. It therefore makes sense to investigate whether and how Kuhn’s insights about specialization are consistent with, and actually fit, his model of scientific progress through revolutions. In this paper, I argue that the transition toward a new specialty corresponds to a revolutionary change for the group of scientists involved (...) in such a transition. I will clarify the role of the scientific community in revolutionary changes and characterize the incommensurability across specialties as possessing both semantic and methodological aspects. The discussion of the discovery of the structure of DNA will serve both as an illustration of my main argument and as reply to one criticism raised against Kuhn—namely, that his model cannot capture cases of revolutionary yet non-disruptive episodes of scientific progress. Revisiting Kuhn’s ideas on specialization will shed new light on some often overlooked features of scientific change. (shrink)

Few philosophers of science have influenced as many readers as Thomas S. Kuhn. Yet no comprehensive study of his ideas has existed--until now. In this volume, Paul Hoyningen-Huene examines Kuhn's work over four decades, from the days before The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to the present, and puts Kuhn's philosophical development in a historical framework. Scholars from disciplines as diverse as political science and art history have offered widely differing interpretations of Kuhn's ideas, appropriating his notions of paradigm shifts (...) and revolutions to fit their own theories, however imperfectly. Hoyningen-Huene does not merely offer another interpretation--he brings Kuhn's work into focus with rigorous philosophical analysis. Through extended discussions with Kuhn and an encyclopedic reading of his work, Hoyningen-Huene looks at the problems and justifications of his claims and determines how his theories might be expanded. Most significantly, he discovers that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions can be understood only with reference to the historiographic foundation of Kuhn's philosophy. Discussing the concepts of paradigms, paradigm shifts, normal science, and scientific revolutions, Hoyningen-Huene traces their evolution to Kuhn's experience as a historian of contemporary science. From here, Hoyningen-Huene examines Kuhn's well-known thesis that scientists on opposite sides of a revolutionary divide "work in different worlds," explaining Kuhn's notion of a world-change during a scientific revolution. He even considers Kuhn's most controversial claims--his attack on the distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification and his notion of incommensurability--addressing both criticisms and defenses of these ideas. Destined to become the authoritative philosophical study of Kuhn's work, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions both enriches our understanding of Kuhn and provides powerful interpretive tools for bridging Continental and Anglo-American philosophical traditions. (shrink)

The novel understanding of the physical world that characterized the Scientific Revolution depended on a fundamental shift in the way its protagonists understood and described space. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, spatial phenomena were described in relation to a presupposed central point; by its end, space had become a centerless void in which phenomena could only be described by reference to arbitrary orientations. David Marshall Miller examines both the historical and philosophical aspects of this far-reaching development, (...) including the rejection of the idea of heavenly spheres, the advent of rectilinear inertia, and the theoretical contributions of Copernicus, Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. His rich study shows clearly how the centered Aristotelian cosmos became the oriented Newtonian universe, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of the history and philosophy of science. (shrink)

In his book Struktura rewolucji relatywistycznej i kwantowej w fizyce (The Structure of the Relativistic and Quantum Revolution in Physics, 2020), Wojciech Sady presents his vision of the two greatest scientific revolutions in the 20th century. The book provides an illuminating account of the way these revolutions proceeded and strongly supports the thesis that, contrary to Thomas Kuhn’s famous suggestions, the revolutions involved no breaches in the continuity in scientific development but progressed in an evolutionary (although swift) (...) step-by-step way, and were products of collective interactive processes in the scientific community rather than individual achievements of geniuses. On the other hand, it makes a number of controversial claims. In this article, I contest Sady’s claims that new scientific theories (including the most revolutionary ones) logically follow from the theoretical and experimental knowledge already available (the Entailment thesis) or, at least, their emergence is necessary, inevitable, given the available knowledge, the thought style of the scientific community, and some minimally necessary conditions for the development of science (the Necessitation thesis), and that the role of extra-logical and extra-empirical factors, that can be designated as “creative imagination,” in the development of science is either negative or neglectable. (shrink)

Weinert defends a distinctively anti-Kuhnian position on scientific revolutions, predicating his argument on a nuanced and clear case analysis. He also builds on his previous work on eliminative induction that he sees as the central scientific method in the rise of revolutionary theories. The treatment of social sciences as revolutionary offers the key elements of a promising ambitious project. His botched attempt to portray the Darwinian view of mind as a brand of emergentism is the only weak point (...) if this insightful book. (shrink)

Science has had a profound influence in shaping contemporary perspectives of reality, yet few in the public have fully grasped the profound implications of scientific discoveries. This book describes three intellectual revolutions that led to the current scientific consensus, emphasizing how science over the centuries has undermined traditional, religious worldviews. The author begins in ancient Greece, where the first revolution took place. Beginning in the sixth-century BCE, a series of innovative thinkers rejected the mythology of their culture (...) and turned to rational analysis and the empirical study of reality. This change in thinking, though it lay dormant for the many centuries of Christian hegemony in the West, eventually gave rise to the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries--the second revolution. Highlighted by such luminaries as Kepler, Galileo, and Isaac Newton, the Enlightenment laid the foundations for our current understanding of the world. Today we live amidst the third scientific revolution, including Darwin's theory of evolution, Planck's concept of the quantum, Einstein's relativity theories, Bohr's quantum mechanics, along with Watson and Crick's decoding of the human genome with the prospect of improving human nature. Besides technological wonders, this revolution has also supported widespread respect for freedom of thought, greater educational opportunities, and democratic governments. Looking to the future, Schlagel sees many exciting possibilities yet also potentially devastating threats to the environment. He underscores the need for widespread scientific literacy, stressing that only unfettered scientific inquiry offers a realistic hope of overcoming these daunting challenges. (shrink)

List of contributors; Acknowledgments; Introduction Robert S. Westman and David C. Lindberg; 1. Conceptions of the scientific revolution from Bacon to Butterfield: a preliminary sketch David C. Lindberg; 2. Conceptions of science in the scientific revolution Ernan McMullin; 3. Metaphysics and the new science Gary Hatfield; 4. Proof, portics, and patronage: Copernicus’s preface to De revolutionibus Robert S. Westman; 5. A reappraisal of the role of the universities in the scientific revolution John Gascoigne; 6. (...) Natural magic, hermetism, and occultism in early modern science Brian P. Copenhaver; 7. Natural history and the emblematic world view William B. Ashworth, Jr.; 8. From the secrets of nature to public knowledge William Eamon; 9. Chemistry in the scientific revolution: problems of language and communication Jan V. Golinski; 10. The new philosophy and medicine in seventeenth-century England Harold J. Cook; 11. Science and heterodoxy: an early modern problem reconsidered Michael Hunter; 12. Infinitesimals and transcendent relations: the mathematics of motion in the late seventeenth century Michael S. Mahoney; 13. The case of mechanics: one revolution or many? Alan Gabbey; Index. (shrink)

Scientific realism, the position that successful theories are likely to be approximately true, is threatened by the pessimistic induction according to which the history of science is full of suc- cessful, but false theories. I aim to defend scientific realism against the pessimistic induction. My main thesis is that our current best theories each enjoy a very high degree of predictive success, far higher than was enjoyed by any of the refuted theories. I support this thesis by showing (...) that both the amount, and quality, of scientific evidence has increased enormously in the recent past, resulting in a big boost of success for the best theories. (shrink)

The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, published in 1980, presented a view of the Scientific Revolution that challenged the hegemony of mechanistic science as a marker of progress. It argued that seventeenth‐century science could be implicated in the ecological crisis, the domination of nature, and the devaluation of women in the production of scientific knowledge. This essay offers a twenty‐five‐year retrospective of the book’s contributions to ecofeminism, environmental history, and reassessments of (...) the Scientific Revolution. It also responds to challenges to the argument that Francis Bacon’s rhetoric legitimated the control of nature. Although Bacon did not use terms such as “the torture of nature,” his followers, with some justification, interpreted his rhetoric in that light. (shrink)

Scientific revolution has been one of the most controversial topics in the history and philosophy of science. Yet it has been no consensus on what is the best unit of analysis in the historiography of scientific revolutions. Nor is there a consensus on what best explains the nature of scientific revolutions. This chapter provides a critical examination of the historiography of scientific revolutions. It begins with a brief introduction to the historical development of the concept (...) of scientific revolution, followed by an overview of the five main philosophical accounts of scientific revolutions. It then challenges two historiographical assumptions of the philosophical analyses of scientific revolutions. (shrink)

The twentieth century saw extended development in the philosophy of science to incorporate contemporary expansions of scientific theory and investigation. Richard Rorty was a prominent and rather controversial thinker who maintained that all progress, from social change to scientific inquiry, was achieved through the redescription of existing vocabularies. However, this theory fails to describe revolutionary scientific progress. Thomas Kuhn’s theories of paradigm change, as first described in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, better portray (...) this process. I attempt to show this by applying Kuhn’s and Rorty’s views to examples of scientific progress and comparing the results. (shrink)

The question whether Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions could be applied to mathematics caused many interesting problems to arise. The aim of this paper is to discuss whether there are different kinds of scientific revolution, and if so, how many. The basic idea of the paper is to discriminate between the formal and the social aspects of the development of science and to compare them. The paper has four parts. In the first introductory part we discuss some (...) of the questions which arose during the debate of the historians of mathematics. In the second part, we introduce the concept of the epistemic framework of a theory. We propose to discriminate three parts of this framework, from which the one called formal frame will be of considerable importance for our approach, as its development is conservative and gradual. In the third part of the paper we define the concept of epistemic rupture as a discontinuity in the formal frame. The conservative and gradual nature of the changes of the formal frame open the possibility to compare different epistemic ruptures. We try to show that there are four different kinds of epistemic rupture, which we call idealisation, re-presentation, objectivisation and re-formulation. In the last part of the paper we derive from the classification of the epistemic ruptures a classification of scientific revolutions. As only the first three kinds of rupture are revolutionary (the re-formulations are rather cumulative), we obtain three kinds of scientific revolution: idealisation, re-presentation, and objectivisation. We discuss the relation of our classification of scientific revolutions to the views of Kuhn, Lakatos, Crowe, and Dauben. (shrink)

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion.

Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions became the most widely read book about science in the twentieth century. His terms 'paradigm' and 'scientific revolution' entered everyday speech, but they remain controversial. In the second half of the twentieth century, the new field of cognitive science combined empirical psychology, computer science, and neuroscience. In this book, the theories of concepts developed by cognitive scientists are used to evaluate and extend Kuhn's most influential ideas. Based on case studies of (...) the Copernican revolution, the discovery of nuclear fission, and an elaboration of Kuhn's famous 'ducks and geese' example of concept learning, this volume, first published in 2006, offers accounts of the nature of normal and revolutionary science, the function of anomalies, and the nature of incommensurability. (shrink)

This chapter poses questions about the existence and character of the Scientific Revolution by deriving its initial categories of analysis and its initial understanding of the intellectual scene from the writings of the seventeenth century, and by following the evolution of these initial categories in succeeding centuries. This project fits the theme of cross cultural transmission and appropriation -- a theme of the present volume -- if one takes the notion of a culture broadly, so that, say, seventeenth (...) and eighteenth or nineteenth century European intellectual cultures are deemed sufficiently distinct that one can speak of the "transmission" of texts and ideas from the one to the other as cross cultural. I maintain that a process of transforming and assimilating seventeenth century achievements manifests itself in two distinct cultures of interpretation, one developed by historians of philosophy, the other by scientists and historians of science. The first, following actor's categories, interprets the revolution in the seventeenth century as a philosophical displacement, partly fomented by a radical change in astronomical theory; the second, retrospectively applying the post nineteenth century sense of the term "science" to seventeenth century events, finds a "scientific" revolution, or the birth of modern science. The chapter proposes interpreting the Scientific Revolution as a revolution in natural philosophy and metaphysics. (shrink)

T. S. Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, [1], is a long and complex work, containing a large number of examples and arguments bearing on questions in the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. My treatment of it here will necessarily be limited, but I will try to state its main theses and discuss them insofar as this can be done without detailed examination of the examples cited from the history of science.

We have to distinguish between the scientific revolution which was bound on the work of Copernicus and the cultural-ideological changes that have accompanied and framed this revolution. The "Copernican" revolution was in the beginning a constituent of cultural and ideological changes at the end of Renaissance but it became a scientific revolution only with Galilei and Kepler. This was the first scientific revolution which inagurated the internal dynamics of the scientific development. (...) A necessary condition of that revolution was the incorporation of a consistent physical dynamics into astronomy. This happened with the formulation of Kepler's laws and the Galilei's postulates of relative movements, the law of inertia and of free fall, which are valid for all physical cosmos. (shrink)

In the Kuhnian and Post-Kuhnian Philosophy of Science, it is widely accepted that scientific revolutions always involve the replacement of an old paradigm by a new paradigm. This article attempts to refute this assumption by showing that there are paradigm-constellations that conform to the relation of a scientific revolution in a Kuhnian sense without a paradigm-replacement occurring. The paradigms investigated here are the linguistic paradigms of Generative Grammar and Construction Grammar that, contrary to Kuhn’s conception of a (...) sequence of paradigm-replacements, are reconstructed as coexisting competing paradigms. By choosing linguistic paradigms, Kuhn’s assumption that paradigm-led research takes place only in the natural sciences is implicitly challenged, and an insight into linguistic theory-construction largely underrepresented in the philosophy of science is given. (shrink)

Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a watershed event when it was published in 1962, upending the previous understanding of science as a slow, logical accumulation of facts and introducing, with the concept of the “paradigm shift,” social and psychological considerations into the heart of the scientific process. More than fifty years after its publication, Kuhn’s work continues to influence thinkers in a wide range of fields, including scientists, historians, and sociologists. It is clear that (...) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions itself marks no less of a paradigm shift than those it describes. In Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” at Fifty, leading social scientists and philosophers explore the origins of Kuhn’s masterwork and its legacy fifty years on. These essays exhume important historical context for Kuhn’s work, critically analyzing its foundations in twentieth-century science, politics, and Kuhn’s own intellectual biography: his experiences as a physics graduate student, his close relationship with psychologists before and after the publication of Structure, and the Cold War framework of terms such as “world view” and “paradigm.”. (shrink)

This paper contests the view that the events which have taken place in linguistics following the syntactic theories of N. Chomsky conform to the pattern of scientific development described in Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Specifically, it is argued that neither Kuhn's claims about the nature of 'normal science', nor those about the necessity of crisis preceding periods of revolutionary change, nor those about 'paradigms' succeeding one another in the history of a science, find any confirmation in (...) the case of the generative revolution in linguistics. (shrink)

In a previous article we have shown that Kuhn's theory of concepts is independently supported by recent research in cognitive psychology. In this paper we propose a cognitive re-reading of Kuhn's cyclical model of scientific revolutions: all of the important features of the model may now be seen as consequences of a more fundamental account of the nature of concepts and their dynamics. We begin by examining incommensurability, the central theme of Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, according to (...) two different cognitive models of concept representation. We provide new support for Kuhn 's mature views that incommensurability can be caused by changes in only a few concepts, that even incommensurable conceptual systems can be rationally compared, and that scientific change of the most radical sort—the type labeled revolutionary in earlier studies—does not have to occur holistically and abruptly, but can be achieved by a historically more plausible accumulation of smaller changes. We go on to suggest that the parallel accounts of concepts found in Kuhn and in cognitive science lead to a new understanding of the nature of normal science, of the transition from normal science to crisis, and of scientific revolutions. The same account enables us to understand how scientific communities split to create groups supporting new paradigms, and to resolve various outstanding problems. In particular, we can identify the kind of change needed to create a revolution rather precisely. This new analysis also suggests reasons for the unidirectionality of scientific change. (shrink)

It is exhibited that maxwellian electrodynamics grew out of the old pre-maxwellian programmes reconciliation: the electrodynamics of Ampere-Weber, the wave theory of Young-Fresnel and Faraday’s scientific research programme. The programmes’ meeting led to construction of the whole hierarchy of theoretical objects starting from the genuine crossbreeds (the displacement current) and up to usual mongrels. After the displacement current invention the interpenetration of the pre-maxwellian programmes began that marked the beginning of theoretical schemes of optics and electromagnetism real unification. Maxwell’s (...) programme did supersede its rivals because it had assimilated some ideas of the Ampere-Weber programme, as well as the presuppositions of the programmes of Young-Fresnel and Faraday. Maxwellian programme’s victory over its rivals became possible because the core of Maxwell’s unification strategy was formed by Kantian epistemology looked through the prism of William Whewell and such representatives of Scottish Enlightenment as Thomas Reid and William Hamilton. It was Kantian epistemology that enabled Hermann von Helmholtz and Heinrich Hertz to arrive at such a version of Maxwell’s theory that could serve a heuristical basis for the radio waves discovery. (shrink)

The Scientific Revolution was far from the anti-Aristotelian movement traditionally pictured. Its applied mathematics pursued by new means the Aristotelian ideal of science as knowledge by insight into necessary causes. Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s elliptical planetary orbits from the inverse square law of gravity is a central example.

To understand the radical transformations brought about by modern science concerning the order of nature, it is necessary first to mention the significance of the traditional sciences of the cosmos and the fact that they shared, in contrast to modern science, the same universe of discourse with the religion or religions of the civilization in whose bosom they were cultivated. In fact, modern science not only eclipsed the religious and traditional philosophical understanding of the order of nature in the West, (...) but it also all but destroyed the traditional sciences. The divorce of the meaning of order in nature from its traditional sense and the substitution for it of laws governing the running of a machine—an idea so central to the rise of the Scientific Revolution and the eclipse of the traditional religious understanding of nature—is closely related to the modern idea of “laws of nature” that appeared at this time and became widely held in the 17th century. (shrink)

Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is notable for the readiness with which it drew on the results of cognitive psychology. These naturalistic elements were not well received and Kuhn did not subsequently develop them in his pub- lished work. Nonetheless, in a philosophical climate more receptive to naturalism, we are able to give a more positive evaluation of Kuhn’s proposals. Recently, philosophers such as Nersessian, Nickles, Andersen, Barker, and Chen have used the results of work on case-based reasoning, analogical (...) thinking, dynamic frames, and the like to illuminate and develop various aspects of Kuhn’s thought in Structure. In particular this work aims to give depth to the Kuhnian concepts of a paradigm and incommensurability. I review this work and identify two broad strands of research. One emphasizes work on concepts; the other focusses on cognitive habits. After contrasting these, I argue that the conceptual strand fails to be a complete account of scientific revolutions. We need a broad approach that draws on a variety of resources in psychology and cognitive science. (shrink)

A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were—and still are. _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions _is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. (...) Fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, _Kuhn challenged long-standing linear notions of scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don’t arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation but that the revolutions in science, those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of “normal science,” as he called it. Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in our biotech age. This new edition of Kuhn’s essential work in the history of science includes an insightful introduction by Ian Hacking, which clarifies terms popularized by Kuhn, including paradigm and incommensurability, and applies Kuhn’s ideas to the science of today. Usefully keyed to the separate sections of the book, Hacking’s introduction provides important background information as well as a contemporary context. Newly designed, with an expanded index, this edition will be eagerly welcomed by the next generation of readers seeking to understand the history of our perspectives on science. (shrink)

What are the reasons of the second scientific revolution that happened at the beginning of the XX century? Why did the new physics supersede the old one? The author tries to answer the subtle questions with a help of the epistemological model of scientific revolutions that takes into account some recent advances in philosophy, sociology and history of science. According to the model, Einstein’s Revolution took place due to resolution of deep contradictions between the basic classical (...) research traditions: Newtonian mechanics, maxwellian electrodynamics, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. As a result, two new research programmes – relativistic and quantum- had been constructed. It was the interaction between them that formed the interdisciplinary context of Einstein’s Revolution. (shrink)