Discussion: Kuhn’s Evolutionary Analogy in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and “The Road since Structure”

Philosophy of Science 77 (3):468-476 (2010)
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Abstract

Recently, Barbara Renzi argued that Kuhn's account of scientific change is undermined by mismatches in the analogy that Kuhn supposedly draws between scientific change and biological evolution. We argue that Renzi's criticism is inadequate to Kuhn's account of scientific change, as Kuhn does not draw any precise analogy between the mechanisms of scientific change and biological evolution nor aims to argue that the mechanisms of scientific change and biological evolution are similar in any important respects. Therefore, pointing to mismatches between the central concepts that feature in the descriptions of the two phenomena simply misses the point of Kuhn's analogy. *Received January 2010; revised January 2010. †To contact the authors, please write to: Thomas A. C. Reydon, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Im Moore 21, D‐30167 Hannover, Germany; e‐mail: [email protected]‐hannover.de.

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Author Profiles

Thomas A. C. Reydon
Universität Hannover
Paul Hoyningen-Huene
Universität Hannover

Citations of this work

Kuhnianism and Neo-Kantianism: On Friedman’s Account of Scientific Change.Thodoris Dimitrakos - 2016 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 30 (4):361-382.

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References found in this work

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Ian Hacking.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.David Bohm - 1964 - Philosophical Quarterly 14 (57):377-379.
Thomas Kuhn.Alexander Bird - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The Road since Structure.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1990 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1990:3-13.

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