In this essay I argue that Kuhn's account of science, as it was articulated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was mainly defended on philosophical rather than historical grounds. I thus lend support to Kuhn's later claim that his model can be derived from first principles. I propose a transcendental reading of his work and I suggest that Kuhn uses historical examples as anti-essentialist Wittgensteinian "reminders" that expose a variegated landscape in the development of science.

The present paper argues that there is an affinity between Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and Wittgenstein's philosophy. It is maintained, in particular, that Kuhn's notion of paradigm draws on such Wittgensteinian concepts as language games, family resemblance, rules, forms of life. It is also claimed that Kuhn's incommensurability thesis is a sequel of the theory of meaning supplied by Wittgenstein's later philosophy. As such its assessment is not fallacious, since it is not an empirical hypothesis and it does (...) not have the relativistic implications Kuhn's critics repeatedly indicated. Although concepts are indeed relative to a language game or paradigm, interparadigmatic intelligibility is preserved through the standard techniques of translation or praxis. The impossibility of radical translation which is captured by the claim of incommensurability lies with that which cannot be said but only shown. (shrink)

The present paper argues that there is an affinity between Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and Wittgenstein's philosophy. It is maintained, in particular, that Kuhn's notion of paradigm draws on such Wittgensteinian concepts as language games, family resemblance, rules, forms of life. It is also claimed that Kuhn's incommensurability thesis is a sequel of the theory of meaning supplied by Wittgenstein's later philosophy. As such its assessment is not fallacious, since it is not an empirical hypothesis and it does (...) not have the relativistic implications Kuhn's critics repeatedly indicated. Although concepts are indeed relative to a language game or paradigm, interparadigmatic intelligibility is preserved through the standard techniques of translation or praxis. The impossibility of radical translation which is captured by the claim of incommensurability lies with that which cannot be said but only shown. (shrink)

Both Kuhn and Cavell acknowledge their indebtedness to each other in their respective books of the 60s. Cavell in (Must We Mean What We Say (1969)) and Kuhn in (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 1962). They were together at Berkeley where they had both moved in 1956 as assistant professors after their first encounter at the Society of Fellows at Harvard (Kuhn 2000d, p. 197). In Berkeley, Cavell and Kuhn discovered a mutual understanding and an intellectual affinity. They had regular (...) conversations which Cavell describes as "extremely important" (Conant 1989, p. 40; cf. Cavell 1979, p. xix). Cavell says that he felt he wanted to assure Kuhn that "philosophy did not have standing answers to the questions [Kuhn] .. (shrink)

: In this essay I argue that Kuhn's account of science, as it was articulated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was mainly defended on philosophical rather than historical grounds. I thus lend support to Kuhn's later claim that his model can be derived from first principles. I propose a transcendental reading of his work and I suggest that Kuhn uses historical examples as anti-essentialist Wittgensteinian "reminders" that expose a variegated landscape in the development of science.

This article criticizes the attempts by Bas van Fraassen and Michael Friedman to address the challenge to rationality posed by the Kuhnian analysis of scientific revolutions. In the paper, I argue that van Fraassen's solution, which invokes a Sartrean theory of emotions to account for radical change, does not amount to justifying rationally the advancement of science but, rather, despite his protestations to the contrary, is an explanation of how change is effected. Friedman's approach, which appeals to philosophical developments at (...) a meta-theoretical level, does not really address the problem of rationality as posed by Kuhn's work. Instead of showing how, despite revolutions, scientific development is, indeed, rational, he gives a transcendental account of rational scientific progress. (shrink)

Up to the introduction of the term and concept of incommensurability by T. S. Kuhn and P. K. Feyerabend in the early 1960s, scientific texts were supposed to pose no problem as regards their translation, unlike literature, which was thought very difficult to translate. After the introduction of the term, translation of scientific language became equally problematic because, due to conceptual and perceptual incommensurability, there was no common observation basis to ground linguistic equivalences between languages of incommensurable paradigms. This article (...) highlights the presuppositions that link incommensurability to dramatic consequences (impossibility of communication, translation, and comparative evaluation of paradigms) and tries to sketch an alternative way of understanding incommensurability and translation drawing on Kuhn’s work. From this perspective, translation is not an all-or-nothing affair for either science or literature and becomes a problem to be solved for each particular set of circumstances. (shrink)

Philosophy of science was formed as a distinct discipline in the early twentieth century around the work of the logical positivists, or logical empiricists, originally in Vienna in the mid‐twenties and in other European cities such as Berlin and Prague. It further developed in the United States, where most logical positivists moved to escape persecution by the Nazis or World War II and met the American pragmatist philosophers of science. Logical positivism, or logical empiricism, is the school of thought that (...) is most responsible for the shaping of philosophy of science as a contemporary, distinct academic discipline in the early twentieth century. The historical turn in philosophy of science in the late 1950s and early 1960s has been associated mostly with the work of philosophers such as Stephen Toulmin, N.R. Hanson, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend, who were active publishing books and papers at that time in the United States. (shrink)

In the paper I consider how empirical material, from either history or sociology, features in Kuhn’s account of science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and argue that the study of scientific practice did not offer him data to be used as evidence for defending hypotheses but rather cultivated a sensitivity for detail and difference which helped him undermine an idealized conception of science. Recent attempts in the science studies literature, appealing to Wittgenstein’s philosophy, have aimed at reducing philosophy to (...) multifaceted empirical research in relation to science. I discuss how this turn which is at odds with Wittgenstein’s philosophy, cannot be a continuation of Kuhn’s project which bears similarities to Wittgenstein’s. (shrink)

Abstract Biography is usually distinguished from history and, in comparison, looked down upon. R. G. Collingwood's view of biography seems to fit this statement considering that he says it has only gossip-value and that “history it can never be“. His main concern is that biography exploits and arouses emotions which he excludes from the domain of history. In the paper I will try to show that one can salvage a more positive view of biography from within Collingwood's work and claim (...) that his explicit attacks against biography target specifically the sensationalist kind. First, I will show that Collingwood, in his later writings, allowed that, not only thought, but also relevant emotions can be the subject matter of history, which means that even if one takes biography to deal with emotions, it can still qualify as history. Second, I will argue, based mainly on Collingwood's Principles of Art , that biography can be compared to portrait painting, in which case, it can be redeemed as a work of art and not just craft and, thus, have more than entertainment value. It can also be part of history, and more specifically part of the history of art which Collingwood endorses, if one takes the life of an individual, recounted by a biographer, to be an artistic creation, as Collingwood seems to suggest. (shrink)

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science aims to publish original articles, book reviews and discussion notes that fall within what is currently understood as philosophy of science and th...

2020 was the year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The challenges it presented brought science to the fore in a multitude of ways. The world economy depended on science, governments consulted it, the publ...

The Quest for Physical Theory (QPT) comprises the eight Lowell lectures that Kuhn gave on Tuesdays and Fridays in March 1951 in the Lecture Hall of the Boston Library. He was 28 years old at the time, a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, a recent Harvard PhD in Physics (1949), and an instructor in the general-education course on science set up by James Conant, Harvard’s President. Kuhn seized the opportunity of the Lowell Lectures to present his new, and (...) ground-breaking at the time, take on science which was shaped by Kuhn’s forays in psychology, philosophy, history, and logic. It is obvious from reading the lectures that Kuhn was very confident of his views and was aiming to jolt the public with his revisionary account. To a complacent audience, accustomed to the standard, textbook picture of science, he hurled the provocative claims that there are no pure facts, that prejudice plays a decisive role in scientific practice, that the then-current history of science fabricated mythologies about past science, that perception is not passive, and that the overthrow of a theory does not add to previous knowledge. All these claims more than foreshadow the basic elements of Kuhn’s model in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR). It is not just that the lectures speak to the emergence of Kuhn’s ideas that were later refined, as George Reisch, the editor of QPT, says in his introductory essay. The lectures show that Kuhn had conceived his model, almost in its entirety, very early on, which means that the much-debated influence exercised on him by later works, such as Toulmin’s, Hanson’s, or Polanyi’s in the 1950s, was secondary to the exploratory readings of his youth. These later influences must have solidified his early conception. (shrink)

This is a book review of Vasso Kindi and Theodore Arabatzis (Eds.), Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Revisited.

A pyxis in a registered private collection in Limassol, said to have been found in a tomb at Amathus. Several pyxides of the same early Geometric period are already known from this site, similarly decorated, but are all rectangular, whereas the one we describe here is crescent-shaped and has on its front a figurine in high relief of a standing female with uplifted arms, the well-known goddess who was introduced to Cyprus from Crete. In Cyprus she was assimilated with the (...) goddess of fertility, whose symbol, in the Near East, is the crescent. Is it possible that the shape of the pyxis may be related with the figurine? (shrink)

This bold argument is at the center of this book that challenges the widespread assumption that environmentalism reflects a radical departure from modernity.

Risālah fī al-falsafah al-ūlá -- Risālah fī al-ḥīlah li-dafʻ al-aḥzān -- Risālah fī al-ʻaql -- Risālah fī ḥudūd al-ashyāʼ wa-rusūmihā.

Twentieth-century anthropology has been operating with the assumption of one nature and many cultures, one reality experienced and lived in many different ways. Its primary job, therefore, has been to render the otherness of the other understandable, to demonstrate that although different it is also the same; in short, to show that although other, others are people like us. The latest theoretical paradigm, known as the ‘ontological turn’, appears to reverse this assumption and to posit many natures and one culture. (...) Whether it does in fact reverse it and constitutes a meta-ontology, as critics have pointed out, or it is only a heuristic, methodological device, as some of the proponents of the ‘turn’ have recently argued, the contention of my article is the same: first, this move – the ontological – is made in the hope of doing a better job in redeeming otherness than earlier anthropological paradigms; second, it fails as they did – in the same way and for the same reasons. (shrink)

There are two widely held views in the literature as regards Wittgenstein’s philosophy. One says that Wittgenstein in his later work appeals to ordinary language in his effort to show how the philosophical problems can be dissolved, and the other says that his investigation is a grammatical one. This paper undertakes to examine what is meant by a grammatical investigation, especially in view of the fact that this investigation relies on empirical facts that have to do with linguistic usage. The (...) examination is carried out by concentrating on what Wittgenstein has to say on the issue of knowledge – in particular, how the way we use the word contributes to the dismissal of Moore's answer to the challenge of scepticism. The conclusion is that Wittgenstein's resort to ordinary language is not typically empirical. The examples of ordinary usage that he cites may be contingent, but they could not have been different given the language games they are part of. The correct use of words Wittgenstein appeals to is not fixed by some kind of essence, but neither is it decided by a majority rule. It gets entrenched in a complex nexus of practices. Wittgenstein's reference to “use” instead of ‘usage”and to “linguistic facts” instead of “sociological facts” lends support more to a logical than to an empirical investigation. (shrink)

The Late Bronze Age gypsum mould discussed hère was first interpreted as a gold worker's mould. It wears the matrices, for the "lost wax" process, of three figures. At one side, a man is shown holding a jug in each hand and wearing a short kilt and a short-sleaved, tightly fitting garment. He probably formed part of a ritual scène. At the other side are two figures fighting with spears and wearing kilts with horizontal stripes. They may hâve formed a (...) "lutte sportive", a fréquent thème in Aegean iconography. The object under discussion is actually a mould for the décorative éléments of a four-sided bronze stand. Such stands are well known in Cypriot bronzeworking and this mould expands their décorative repertory. (shrink)

A pyxis in a registered private collection in Limassol, said to have been found in a tomb at Amathus. Several pyxides of the same early Geometric period are already known from this site, similarly decorated, but are all rectangular, whereas the one we describe here is crescent-shaped and has on its front a figurine in high relief of a standing female with uplifted arms, the well-known goddess who was introduced to Cyprus from Crete. In Cyprus she was assimilated with the (...) goddess of fertility, whose symbol, in the Near East, is the crescent. Is it possible that the shape of the pyxis may be related with the figurine? (shrink)

Épître des définitions.--Propos succinct et bref sur l'âme.--Traité sur la quiddité du sommeil et de la vision.--De ce qu'il y a des substances incorporelles.--De l'unicité de Dieu et de la finitude du corps du monde.

Rituels et images sont mis en miroir dès le titre, annonçant d’emblée le sujet traité dans cet ouvrage collectif soigneusement édité par Anne-Françoise Jaccottet. Au croisement de l’iconographie, de l’histoire des religions et de l’archéologie, dix-neuf contributions mettent en lumière des points précis questionnant les liens réciproques entre images et rituels et donnent à cette publication un caractère remarquable. Ce recueil d’études s’inscrit dans le prolongement d’autres ouvrages connus...

Depuis le début du XXe s., le pourtour de la baie du Mirambello, région charnière entre la Crète centrale et la Crète orientale, a fait l’objet d’une exploration archéologique intense qui a permis de mettre au jour de très nombreux sites datés entre le Minoen Récent et l’époque archaïque. Il est ainsi aujourd’hui possible de se représenter plus clairement l’occupation de la région entre l’effondrement du système palatial et l’apparition de la cité grecque. Dans cette perspective régionale et historique, les (...) nouvelles recherches entreprises dans l’habitat géométrique de l’Anavlochos et les résultats préliminaires auxquels elles sont parvenues apportent un éclairage nouveau sur cette phase de transition cruciale. (shrink)