A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were—and still are. _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions _is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. Fifty (...) years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, _Kuhn challenged long-standing linear notions of scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don’t arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation but that the revolutions in science, those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of “normal science,” as he called it. Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in our biotech age. This new edition of Kuhn’s essential work in the history of science includes an insightful introduction by Ian Hacking, which clarifies terms popularized by Kuhn, including paradigm and incommensurability, and applies Kuhn’s ideas to the science of today. Usefully keyed to the separate sections of the book, Hacking’s introduction provides important background information as well as a contemporary context. Newly designed, with an expanded index, this edition will be eagerly welcomed by the next generation of readers seeking to understand the history of our perspectives on science. (shrink)

BACKGROUND: Reasoning biases have been suggested as risk factors for delusional ideation in both patients and non-clinical individuals. Still, it is unclear how these biases are longitudinally related to delusions in the general population. We hence aimed to investigate longitudinal associations between reasoning biases and delusional ideation in the general population. METHODS: We conducted an online cohort study with 1184 adults from the German and Swiss general population. Participants completed measures on reasoning biases (jumping-to-conclusion bias JTC, liberal acceptance bias LA, (...) bias against disconfirmatory evidence BADE, possibility of being mistaken PM) and delusional ideation at baseline, and delusional ideation 7 to 8 months later. RESULTS: A greater JTC bias was associated with a greater increase in delusional ideation over the following months. This association was better described by a positive quadratic relationship. Neither BADE, LA nor PM were associated with subsequent changes in delusional ideation. CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests that jumping-to-conclusions predicts delusional ideation in the general population but that this association may follow a quadratic trajectory. While no other associations turned significant, future studies with shorter temporal distances may shed further light on the role of reasoning biases as risk factors for delusional ideation in non-clinical samples. (shrink)

The prisoner 's dilemma game has acquired large literatures in several disciplines. It is surprising, therefore, that a good definition of the game is hard to find. Typically an author relates a story about captured criminals or military rivals, provides a particular payoff matrix and asserts that the PD is characterized, or illustrated, by that matrix. In the few cases in which characterizing conditions are given, the conditions, and the motivations for them, do not always agree with each other or (...) with the paradigm examples elsewhere. In this paper we describe several varieties of PD's. In particular, we suggest there are two distinctions among PD's with philosophical significance, the pure/impure and the utilitarian/nonutilitarian distinctions. In the first section, we explain and characterize the two distinctions. In the second, we discuss an issue of moral philosophy that illustrates the significance of the former. (shrink)

A notable early result of David Makinson establishes that every monotone modal logic can be extended to LI, LV, or LF, and every antitone logic can be extended to LN, LV, or LF, where LI, LN, LV, and LF are logics axiomatized, respectively, by the schemas □α↔α, □α↔¬α, □α↔⊤, and □α↔⊥. We investigate logics that are both monotone and antitone (hereafter amphitone). There are exactly three: LV, LF, and the minimum amphitone logic AM axiomatized by the schema □α→□β. These logics, (...) along with LI, LN, and a wider class of “extensional” logics, bear close affinities to classical propositional logic. Characterizing those affinities reveals differences among several accounts of equivalence between logics. Some results about amphitone logics do not carry over when logics are construed as consequence or generalized (“multiple-conclusion”) consequence relations on languages that may lack some or all of the nonmodal connectives. We close by discussing these divergences and conditions under which our results do carry over. (shrink)

The system obtained by adding full propositional quantification to S5 is known to be decidable, while that obtained by doing so for T is known to be recursively intertranslatable with full second-order logic. Recently it was shown that the system with two S5 operators and full propositional quantification is also recursively intertranslatable with second-order logic. This note establishes that the map assigning [1][2]p to \squarep provides a validity and satisfaction preserving translation between the T system and the double S5 system, (...) thus providing an easier proof of the recent result. (shrink)

Ranging from Joseph Bellamy to Hilary Putnam, and from early New England Divinity Schools to contemporary university philosophy departments, historian Bruce Kuklick recounts the story of the growth of philosophical thinking in the United States. Readers will explore the thought of early American philosphers such as Jonathan Edwards and John Witherspoon and will see how the political ideas of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson influenced philosophy in colonial America. Kuklick discusses The Transcendental Club (members Henry David Thoreau, Ralph (...) Waldo Emerson) and describes the rise of pragmatism centered on Metaphysical Club of Cambridge (and members William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Charles Peirce). He examines the profound impact Darwinism had on American philosophy and looks at Idealists such as the Kantian Josiah Royce and the Hegelian John Dewey. The book shows how, in the twentieth century, the Nazi conquest of Europe unleashed a flood of European intellectuals onto these shores, including such major thinkers as Theodore Adorno, Erich Fromm, Rudolph Carnap, and Alfred Tarski. Finally, Kuklick examines the contributions of such contemporary philosophers as Sidney Hook and Willard Quine and such books as John Rawl's A Theory of Justice and Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man. Kuklick pulls no punches in portraying the state of American philosophy today and its contested role in the intellectual life of the nation and the world. The range of philosophical thought in our nation's history has been great, from Edwards's Religious Affections to Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Bruce Kuklick has captured it all in a book that blends intricate details with sweeping vision. (shrink)

Transoral laser microsurgery applies to the piecemeal removal of malignant tumours of the upper aerodigestive tract using the CO2 laser under the operating microscope. This method of surgery is being increasingly popularised as a single modality treatment of choice in early laryngeal cancers (T1 and T2) and occasionally in the more advanced forms of the disease (T3 and T4), predomi- nantly within the supraglottis. Thomas Kuhn, the American physicist turned philosopher and historian of science, coined the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ in (...) his groundbreaking book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He argued that the arrival of the new and often incompatible idea forms the core of a new paradigm, the birth of an entirely new way of thinking. This article discusses whether Steiner and col- leagues truly brought about a paradigm shift in oncological surgery. By rejecting the principle of en block resection and by replacing it with the belief that not only is it oncologically safe to cut through the substance of the tumour but in doing so one can actually achieve better results, Steiner was able to truly revolutionise the man- agement of laryngeal cancer. Even though within this article the repercussions of his insight are limited to the upper aerodigestive tract oncological surgery, his willingness to question other peoples’ dogma makes his contribution truly a genuine paradigm shift. (shrink)

The recent interpretation of Michel Henry’s thought as a ‘phenomenological vitalism’ raises fundamental questions regarding the reception of his phenomenology. The issue raised, however, is not primarily about radical phenomenology being inspired (or not) by more or less vitalistic philosophies like those of Maine de Biran, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and even Freud, rather it concerns the ‘how’ of purely immanent appearing in affect and force understood as immediate corporeality. Does the latter, being original affectivity, require temporality in order to free the (...) affect from its passivity (Passibilit%t) and, thus, in order to enable action? This, however, would lead to an impossible intentional gap or difference within the original phenomenality of life itself. As an alternative, flesh can be seen as a potentiality, inwhich the concrete transcendental possibility and the phenomenological power of appearing as ‘I can’ are already united prior to any formal exercise of freedom. Such inquiry into the reception of the phenomenology of life provides at the same time a framework for the contemporary phenomenological debate. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Don't Laugh at “Slow” Sailing: Average Versus Instantaneous Motion Motion Relative to What? – Galilean Relativity But There are No Fixed Reference Frames – Special Relativity General Relativity – Can it Really Matter?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:116 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Forms not only as objects of contemplation but as patterns of conduct. Presumably the "physicist " is not interested, as physicist, in completing the dialectical journey. So from a moral point of view he rests in opinion, even though his thought may be conversant with Forms. Gully does not like the idea that the philosopher has a privileged method; Plato "gives no proper reason why (...) one particular method or account is privileged" (p. 146).Methods of "collection and division," as developments within the dialectical method, are discussed in the later dialogues, but they never take us to the end of the dialectical journey. Perhaps we should say that the modesty of Socrates in Books VI and VII of the Republic is prophetic. If one is looking for a completed theory of knowledge, one does not find it. Gulley is in agreement with this point, but he feels that if one wants to look for the area in which Plato could have settled on an adequate theory one will find it in the relationship of pure to applied mathematics. He says that Plato develops in his latest thought "a metaphysical theory restricted to the explanation of mathematical knowledge which provides a more satisfactory explanation of the distinction between a priori and empirical knowledge than does the theory of Forms" (p. 187). Yet with a suggestion of surprise he concludes, on Aristotle's testimony, that Plato 2id not "abandon the more general explanation.., which the theory of Forms provided." I 1o not think Gulley wishes to suggest that Plato should have seen the light as Gulley sees it, ~or Gulley conveys the impression of having confronted a puzzling fact. Some readers may be reassured in their efforts to lop off Level IV and commit it to the flames, but the author has presented his case with impartiality. ROBERT REIN'L Arizona State University Monopsychism, Mysticism, Metaconsciousness. Problems of the Soul in the Neo-Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic Tradition. By Philip Merlan. (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1963. Pp. 154.) Innerhalb der Metaphysik liilit sich ein Kreis yon zentralen Fragen abgrenzen und durch den Titel "Noetik" bezeichnen. Wie ist der Mensch zur Erfassung des Seins oder des Absoluten (oder wie sonst der Gegenstand der Metaphysik bezeiehnet werden mag) ausgeriistet? Wie verhiilt sich dies ausgezeichaete VermSgen, mages po~ oder poS~,ro~7~K&oder intellectus oder Vernunft hei[3en, einmal zu seinem Gegenstand, sodann zu den tibrigen VermSgen der menschlichen Seele? Und sehliel]lieh: welehe Bedeutung hat die Be~tigung dieses VermSgens ffir die menschliche Praxis? Nach der Gliederung der Philosophie, wie sie im nach-kantischen Zeitalter iiblich geworden ist, liil~t sich dieser Fragezusammenhang schwer lokalisieren. In die moderne Topologie gepresst, erscheint er als eine Verquickung yon erkenntnistheoretischer, ontologischer, psychologischer und religiiiser Problematik. Aber durehgehend ist der "noetische Bezug", will sagen die Ausriehtung auf die yon den Griechen als ~o~ (inteIlectus, Geist, Vernunft ) bezeichnete Kraft. Der Zugang zu der Fragestellung ergibt sich yon Plato her. Die Seele "bei sich selbst," abr,} ~aO' a~r~, d.i. in AblSsung vom Leib und der dutch ihn vermittelten Sinneswahrnehmung, schaut das An-sich-seiende, die eI~, und diese "reine" Erkenntnis wird verstanden als Wiedererinnerung yon vorgeburtlieh Erschautem. Schon bei der Geburt des Menschen findet sich also die Seele im Besitz yon ihr selbst nicht zug~nglichen Erkenntnissen. Bei Aristoteles lebt dieser platonische Gedanke in verwandelter Gestalt fort. Das VermSgen unmittelbarer, nieht-sinnlicher Erkenntnis, der vo~, verhiilt sich nach De anima III zu den,,,m~a (intelligibilia) wie die bei sich seiende Seele zu den "Ideen". Dies Erkennen aber unterscheidet sich nach Aristoteles yon aller diskursiven Erkenntnis dadurch, daft der Intellekt die Intigibilia ist, und dieses Eins-werden, modern gesprochen die Aufhebung der Subjekt-ObjektRelation, gibt der Kennzeichnung des Intellekts als "sch6pferisch" (~o~K6~, intellectus agens) ihren Sinn. Aueh darin folgt Aristoteles seinem Lehrer Plato, daI3 er den Gedanken des "Vorbesitzes ", will sagen der Unentstandenheit der intellektualen Erkenntnis beibehiilt. Aber er gibt ibm eine neue Wendung dadurch, daft er die Ananmesis ersetzt durch den Begriff des ~o~ als einer yon keiner Potentialit~it behafteten reinen, immer und yon je t~itigen b~p.ycta, eines "von aul3en" (~bpad~) in den Mensehen eingeftihrten gSttlichen Prinzips. BOOK REVIEWS 117... (shrink)

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

This book is an introduction to and interpretation of the philosophy of language devised by Donald Davidson over the past 25 years. The guiding intuition is that Davidson's work is best understood as an ongoing attempt to purge semantics of theoretical reifications. Seen in this light the recent attack on the notion of language itself emerges as a natural development of his Quinian scepticism towards "meanings" and his rejections of reference-based semantic theories. Linguistic understanding is, for Davidson, essentially dynamic, arising (...) only through a continuous process of theory construction and reconstruction. The result is a conception of semantics in which the notion of interpretation and not the notion of knowing a language is fundamental. In the course of his book Bjorn Ramberg provides a critical discussion of reference-based semantic theories, challenging the standard accounts of the principle of charity and elucidating the notion of radical interpretation. The final chapter on incommensurability ties in with the discussions of Kuhn's work in the philosophy of science and suggests certain links between Davidson's analytic semantics and hermeneutic theory. (shrink)

Puzzle-solving, like several other everyday activities, appears in a more sophisticated and ramified form in the realm of natural science. Improving on Thomas Kuhn's rudimentary account of puzzles in science, this paper formulates logical and functional criteria for the occurrence of scientific puzzles, and examines the two-fold nature of their solutions. Then, with the aid of erotetic logic, puzzle-posing questions are identified, their presuppositional relations to scientific theory and explanations are explored, and a new tool for history of science research (...) is developed. (shrink)

This book is an introduction to and interpretation of the philosophy of language devised by Donald Davidson over the past 25 years. The guiding intuition is that Davidson's work is best understood as an ongoing attempt to purge semantics of theoretical reifications. Seen in this light the recent attack on the notion of language itself emerges as a natural development of his Quinian scepticism towards "meanings" and his rejections of reference-based semantic theories. Linguistic understanding is, for Davidson, essentially dynamic, arising (...) only through a continuous process of theory construction and reconstruction. The result is a conception of semantics in which the notion of interpretation and not the notion of knowing a language is fundamental. In the course of his book Bjorn Ramberg provides a critical discussion of reference-based semantic theories, challenging the standard accounts of the principle of charity and elucidating the notion of radical interpretation. The final chapter on incommensurability ties in with the discussions of Kuhn's work in the philosophy of science and suggests certain links between Davidson's analytic semantics and hermeneutic theory. (shrink)

It is a testimony to the enduring importance of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that, 30 years on, its doctrines of normal science and paradigm, incommensurability and revolution continue to challenge metascien tists and stimulate vigorous debate. Critique has mainly come from philosophers and historians; by and large, interested sociologists have embraced Kuhn. Un justifiably so, this article argues, bringing to light a serious difficulty or anom aly in his account of the social side of science. Contrary to (...) what he claims, scientific knowledge is not the achievement of organic communities. It is con structed in trans-epistemic arenas by diverse participants, laypeople, and specialists. Accepting community is a flawed concept in the sociology of science, and in appreciating the major role Kuhn assigned it, the Kuhnian system looks less robust than it did before. (shrink)

The significance of the plurality of the Copernican Revolution is the main thrust of this undergraduate text In this study of the Copernican Revolution, the ...

The received view on the contributions of the physics community to the birth of molecular biology tends to present the physics community as sharing a basic level consensus on how physics should be brought to bear on biology. I argue, however, that a close examination of the views of three leading physicists involved in the birth of molecular biology, Bohr, Delbrück, and Schrödinger, suggests that there existed fundamental disagreements on how physics should be employed to solve problems in biology even (...) within the physics community. In particular, I focus on how these three figures differed sharply in their assessment of the relevance of complementarity, the potential of chemical methods, and the relative importance of classical physics. In addition, I assess and develop Roll-Hansen’s attempt to conceptualize this history in terms of models of scientific change advanced by Kuhn and Lakatos. Though neither model is fully successful in explaining the divergence of views among these three physicists, I argue that the extent and quality of difference in their views help elucidate and extend some themes that are left opaque in Kuhn’s model. (shrink)

The history of the philosophy of thought experiments has touched on the work of Kuhn, Popper, Duhem, Mach, Lakatos, and other big names of the 20th century, but so far, almost nothing has been written about Paul Feyerabend. His most influential work was Against Method, 8 chapters of which concern a case study of Galileo with a specific focus on Galileo’s thought experiments. In addition, the later Feyerabend was very interested in what might be called the epistemology of drama, including (...) stories and myths. This paper brings these different aspects of Feyerabend’s work together in an attempt to present what might have been his considered views on scientific thought experiments. I conclude by contrasting Feyerabend’s ideas with two modern currents in the debate surrounding thought experiments: 1) the claim that the epistemology of thought experiments is just the epistemology of deductive or inductive arguments, and 2) the claim that the specifically narrative quality of thought experiments must be taken into account if we want a complete epistemology of thought experiments. (shrink)

A case study of the development of quantum field theory and of S-matrix theory, from their inceptions to the present, is presented. The descriptions of science given by Kuhn and by Lakatos are compared and contrasted as they apply to this case study. The episodes of the developments of these theories are then considered as candidates for competing research programs in Lakatos' methodology of scientific research programs. Lakatos' scheme provides a reasonable overall description and a plausible assessment of the relative (...) value of these two programs in terms of progressive and degenerating problem shifts. Also discussed are the roles of various types of models as they have been used in these areas of theoretical high-energy physics. (shrink)

The article examines the problem of interpreting normal and revolutionary science in the concept of Thomas Kuhn. It is shown that the “normal science” is the central concept of the Kuhn’s history of science, designed in accordance with the normative definition of science adopted by him. Such a story serves an internal purpose – to justify the special epistemical status of expert knowledge. But there is also an external goal – to establish professional science as an institution with special epistemological (...) status and social function, which is situated in a center of intellectual power and property. Historians are those who are forced to constantly rewrite history – either following the methodology of “rational reconstruction” or responding to the challenges of their time. To be a “conservative” or a “revolutionary” in the history of science is a choice made not only for philosophical reasons, but also under the influence of the general socio-cultural situation of the epoch. (shrink)

Recent work on Imre Lakatos’s missing Hungarian dissertation on the historical sociology of science sheds new light on his mature philosophy of science. Remembered primarily as an “internalist” defender of the autonomy of science, and a Cold Warrior in poli­tics, commentators have mistaken his contribution as primarily a rearguard action against the followers of Thomas Kuhn and the “externalists” influenced by Boris Hessen. It comes as a surprise, then, to find that he developed and retained a fully general soci­ology of (...) scientific knowledge, with Marxist roots that articulated Lenin’s “inexhaustible atom.” He carried forward this emphasis on the fallible, changing, and incomplete nature of our engagement with the natural world by a dialectical account of how research programs advance and recede historically. In his effort to develop a synthesis of Popper and Kuhn, and via his engagement with Paul Feyerabend, he continued to develop a distinctly dialectical ap­proach to science. (shrink)

A highly condensed account of the author's present view of some philosophical problems unresolved in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The concept of incommensurability, now considerably developed, remains at center stage, but the evolutionary metaphor, introduced in the final pages of the book, now also plays a principal role.

The author's concept of incommensurability is explicated by elaborating the claim that some terms essential to the formulation of older theories defy translation into the language of more recent ones. Defense of this claim rests on the distinction between interpreting a theory in a later language and translating the theory into it. The former is both possible and essential, the latter neither. The interpretation/translation distinction is then applied to Kitcher's critique of incommensurability and Quine's conception of a translation manual, both (...) of which take reference-preservation as the sole semantic criterion of translational adequacy. The paper concludes by enquiring about the additional criteria a successful translation must satisfy. (shrink)

The demise of the Superconducting Supercollider is often explained in terms of the strain that it placed on the federal budget of the United States, and change in national security interests with the end of the Cold War. Recent work by Steve Fuller provides a framework to re-examine this episode in epistemological terms using the work of Kuhn and Popper. Using this framework, it is tempting to explain the demise as resulting from the overly Kuhnian character of its proponents, who (...) supposedly argued for its construction by appealing to the importance of testing the predictions of a specific paradigm. On this reading, the SSC case appears as an example of how Kuhn’s paradigm-driven view of science was invoked to keep science closed and autonomous from society. I argue that the SSC episode should not be viewed as giving support to the displacement of Kuhn’s view of science for Popper’s, and that such a displacement is detrimental to the project of integrating discussion on science into the public sphere. Drawing upon Rouse and Wimsatt, I argue that understanding paradigms as practices blunts some criticisms against Kuhn’s model, and that his model should play an important epistemological role in the aforementioned project.Keywords: Thomas S. Kuhn; Karl Popper; Steve Fuller; Big Science; Superconducting Supercollider. (shrink)

A highly condensed account of the author's present view of some philosophical problems unresolved in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The concept of incommensurability, now considerably developed, remains at center stage, but the evolutionary metaphor, introduced in the final pages of the book, now also plays a principal role.

The question, how is profound intellectual disagreement possible, even when addressed toward the paradigmatically reasonable activity of scientific communication, has generated a number of puzzling responses. On a response attributed to Thomas S. Kuhn, some episodes in the history of science don't allow for meaningful disagreement. In such situations, the adversaries talk at cross purposes until one side is either "converted" or dies off. ;This skeptical prospect has also been considered by those who study the differences between natural languages, and (...) the misunderstandings which punctuate a child's first language acquisition. I investigate theories of concepts in search of one capable of illuminating the apparent gaps in communication between scientists, between speakers of different languages, and between infants and adults. I begin by showing that the antipsychologist efforts of post-Fregean philosophers of language, in particular those built on a causal theory of reference, fail to explain either how communication is possible when it is, or why it isn't otherwise. Nor does recourse to a principle of charity or humanity help them in this regard. I conclude that such attempts can't ground an account of communication. ;I argue that an account of concept learning drawn in part from recent work in developmental psychology can explain both the possibility of serious disagreement, as well as the possibility of overcoming it reasonably. I urge that the revival of psychologism in the philosophy of language follows. Semantic psychologism is semantics informed by empirical psychology, not by the phenomenology Frege attacked. I explore the consequences of this doctrine for the philosophy and history of science. These include a rejection of the common philosophical assumption that all meaningful communication can be reduced to a form of translation, and renewed emphasis on the importance of analogy in communication. ;Finally, I apply this new semantic psychologism toward the historical interpretation of science. If the program is right, it should provide insight into the communicative dimensions of important episodes in the history of science. While a full exploration of this historical method lies beyond the scope of my thesis, two preliminary case studies indicate its fruitfulness. (shrink)