Synthese 197 (1):381-406 (2020)
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Abstract |
Alexander Bird indicates that the significance of Thomas Kuhn in the history of philosophy of science is somehow paradoxical. On the one hand, Kuhn was one of the most influential and important philosophers of science in the second half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, nowadays there is little distinctively Kuhn’s legacy in the sense that most of Kuhn’s work has no longer any philosophical significance. Bird argues that the explanation of the paradox of Kuhn’s legacy is that Kuhn took a direction opposite to that of the mainstream of the philosophy of science in his later academic career. This paper aims to provide a new way to understand and develop Kuhn’s legacy by revisiting the development of Kuhn’s philosophy of science in 1970s and proposing a new account of exemplar. Firstly, I propose my diagnosis of Kuhn’s “wrong turning” by identifying Kuhn’s two novel contributions: the introduction of paradigm and the proposal of the incommensurability thesis. Secondly, I argue that Kuhn made a conceptual/terminological turn from paradigm to theory, which undermined Kuhn’s novel contributions. Thirdly, I propose a new articulation of exemplar and propose an exemplar-based approach to analysing the history of science. Finally, I show how the exemplar-based approach can be applied to analyse the history of science by my case study of the early development of genetics.
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Keywords | Exemplar The exemplar-based approach Kuhn The origin of genetics |
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Reprint years | 2020 |
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DOI | 10.1007/s11229-018-1740-9 |
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References found in this work BETA
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas Samuel Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Progress and its Problems: Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth.Larry Laudan - 1977 - University of California Press.
View all 59 references / Add more references
Citations of this work BETA
The Functional Approach: Scientific Progress as Increased Usefulness.Yafeng Shan - 2022 - In New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress. New York: Routledge. pp. 46-61.
Mendel on Developmental Information.Yafeng Shan - 2021 - In Chris Meyns (ed.), Information and the History of Philosophy. London: Routledge. pp. 262-280.
Taxonomies, Networks, and Lexicons: A Study of Kuhn’s Post-‘Linguistic Turn’ Philosophy.Vincenzo Politi - 2021 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 33 (2):87-103.
Interpreting the History of Evolutionary Biology Through a Kuhnian Prism: Sense or Nonsense?Koen B. Tanghe, Lieven Pauwels, Alexis De Tiège & Johan Braeckman - 2021 - Perspectives on Science 29 (1):1-35.
From Empirical Evidence to First Principles: Thomas Kuhn's Methodological Revolution.Paulo Pirozelli - 2021 - Veritas – Revista de Filosofia da Pucrs 65 (3):1-10.
View all 14 citations / Add more citations
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