Traditionally, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is largely identified with his analysis of the structure of scientific revolutions. Here, we contribute to a minority tradition in the Kuhn literature by interpreting the history of evolutionary biology through the prism of the entire historical developmental model of sciences that he elaborates in The Structure. This research not only reveals a certain match between this model and the history of evolutionary biology but, more importantly, also sheds new light (...) on several episodes in that history, and particularly on the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the construction of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the chronic discontent with it, and the latest expression of that discontent, called the extended evolutionary synthesis. Lastly, we also explain why this kind of analysis hasn’t been done before. (shrink)

The concept of “paradigm” became widely known with Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. From there on, paradigms started being employed in the most diverse fields and situations. Curiously, though, the popularity of the term went hand in hand with an enormous vagueness in its application: numerous meanings were attributed to this concept and different things were claimed to be paradigms. The main reason for the lack of agreement regarding the notion and the use of paradigm was the (...) absence of a detailed description and analysis of a concrete paradigm in Kuhn’s book—especially, one coupled with a discussion that could contrast paradigms to other epistemic objects, such as “theories.” The aim of this article is to fill this gap. First, I briefly examine the notion of paradigm, stressing its core meaning as that of “exemplar.” Next, I analyze a specific case in economics, indicating the features that make it a paradigm: (i) the fact that it is an example not reducible to an axiomatizable theory, and (ii) that this example is constitutive of normal science. (shrink)