Kuhn's Evolutionary Social Epistemology

Defends Kuhn's evolutionary social epistemology and examines new directions in Kuhn's view on social constructionism and the sociology of science.

K. Brad Wray (Author)

9781107632905, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 27 March 2014

244 pages, 3 b/w illus. 1 table
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.33 kg

'… highly recommended … The book provides concrete points of cooperative and collaborative studies of the science of sociological and philosophical perspective …' Markus Seidel, Rezensionen: Zeitschrift für Theoretische Soziologie

Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) has been enduringly influential in philosophy of science, challenging many common presuppositions about the nature of science and the growth of scientific knowledge. However, philosophers have misunderstood Kuhn's view, treating him as a relativist or social constructionist. In this book, Brad Wray argues that Kuhn provides a useful framework for developing an epistemology of science that takes account of the constructive role that social factors play in scientific inquiry. He examines the core concepts of Structure and explains the main characteristics of both Kuhn's evolutionary epistemology and his social epistemology, relating Structure to Kuhn's developed view presented in his later writings. The discussion includes analyses of the Copernican revolution in astronomy and the plate tectonics revolution in geology. The book will be useful for scholars working in science studies, sociologists and historians of science as well as philosophers of science.

List of figures and table
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Kuhn's insight
Part I. Revolutions, Paradigms, and Incommensurability: 1. Scientific revolutions as lexical changes
2. The Copernican revolution revisited
3. Kuhn and the discovery of paradigms
4. The epistemic significance of incommensurability
Part II. Kuhn's Evolutionary Epistemology: 5. Kuhn's historical perspective
6. Truth and the end of scientific inquiry
7. Scientific specialization
8. Taking stock of the evolutionary dimensions of Kuhn's epistemology
Part III. Kuhn's Social Epistemology: 9. Kuhn's constructionism
10. What makes Kuhn's epistemology a social epistemology?
11. How does a new theory come to be accepted?
12. Where the road has taken us: a synthesis
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Philosophy of science [PDA], Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge [HPK]