One of my favorite blogs (Stop that Crow) has moved and now has a new location. I was reading through the posts (which have all been transferred to the new site) and came across this treatment of Kuhn’s work. Here’s a couple of paragraphs re: the epistemology of science…

“At the time of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, logical positivism, despite its numerous and significant shortcomings, was fully entrenched as being, in one form or another, a standard for what is and is not science. It thus followed that since there was such a thing as science, that logical positivism necessarily described what some people were doing in the world. This model endorsed, if not fueled the naïve scientific realism which was so prevalent in the 1950’s, for the standards of logical positivism were taken not only as criteria for science, but also as criteria for truth. Science was not the mere functionalist interpretation of experience as had been advocated by Fleck, Whewell and others, but was instead a revelation of reality as it actually is.

Out of such a conception of science rose the history of science as a legitimate school of thought. This discipline was dedicated, more or less, to chronicling the linear progress which necessarily characterized scientific progress as falsified ideas are replaced with accurate or at least more accurate ones. Notice how this conception of science follows directly from the conception of science advocated by the logical positivists. According to such a view, science is constituted by observation conditions, logic and mathematics, and once a theory was logically falsified by experience, it was either replaced by a better one, or tentatively not replaced at all. Thus, science either stayed still or went forward, never backward due to its logical structure.”

Interestingly, this view is now being challenged by the scientific phenomenon of quantum entanglement…

Read the rest here: Moderate Kuhn and Radical Kuhn « Minds, Meaning and Morals