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A must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century.
This book contains the text of Thomas S. Kuhn’s unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the problems that it raised but did not resolve. The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper “Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product” and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, “The Presence of Past Science.” An introduction by the editor describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds and sheds light on its central philosophical problems.
Kuhn’s aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. In his view, incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of the real world that science investigates, the rationality of scientific change, and the idea that scientific development is progressive.
Editor’s Introduction
Editor’s Note
Thomas S. Kuhn: Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product
Abstract for “The Presence of Past Science (The Shearman Memorial Lectures)”
Thomas S. Kuhn: The Presence of Past Science (The Shearman Memorial Lectures)
Lecture I: Regaining the Past
Lecture II: Portraying the Past
Lecture III: Embodying the Past
Abstract for The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development
Thomas S. Kuhn: The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development
Acknowledgments
Part I: The Problem
Chapter 1: Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product
Chapter 2: Breaking into the Past
Chapter 3: Taxonomy and Incommensurability
Part II: A World of Kinds
Chapter 4: Biological Prerequisites to Linguistic Description: Track and Situations
Chapter 5: Natural Kinds: How Their Names Mean
Chapter 6: Practices, Theories, and Artefactual Kinds
Bibliography
Editor’s Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Description
A must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century.
This book contains the text of Thomas S. Kuhn’s unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the problems that it raised but did not resolve. The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper “Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product” and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, “The Presence of Past Science.” An introduction by the editor describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds and sheds light on its central philosophical problems.
Kuhn’s aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. In his view, incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of the real world that science investigates, the rationality of scientific change, and the idea that scientific development is progressive.
