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Kuhn, the correspondence theory of truth and coherentist epistemology. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 38, 555-566
Abstract
Kuhn argued against both the correspondence theory of truth and convergent realism. Although he likely misunderstood the nature of the correspondence theory, which it seems he wrongly believed to be an epistemic theory, Kuhn had an important epistemic point to make. He maintained that any assessment of correspondence between beliefs and reality is not possible, and therefore, the acceptance of beliefs and the presumption of their truthfulness has to be decided on the basis of other criteria. I will show that via Kuhn’s suggested epistemic values, specifically via problem-solving, his philosophy can be incorporated into a coherentist epistemology. Further, coherentism is, in principle, compatible with convergent realism. However, an argument for increasing likeness to truth requires appropriate historical continuity. Kuhn maintained that the history of science is full of discontinuity, and therefore, the historical condition of convergent realism is not satisfied.
... I wish to go further than this and show that his philosophy contains elements that make it fit well with a coherentist epistemology. (Kuukkanen, 2007, p. 559; my emphasis) In other words, the point is not that Kuhn was a rationalist, because he was a coherentist. We are apparently in agreement that Kuhn can be seen as a rationalist with or without coherentism. ...
... It is sufficient here to remind ourselves of Lakatos's words, 'in Kuhn's view scientific revolution is irrational , a matter for mob psychology' (Lakatos, 1970, p. 178). This is the general background of my argument, not any attempt to portray Kuhn as an advocate of an algorithmic kind of rationality, which he clearly wasn't (see Kuukkanen, 2007, p. 562). To say that Kuhn can be seen as a rationalist at all is news, as I suspect there is no consensus on this even today. ...
... The answer is implicit above, but let's spell it out. The point is to go 'further' (Kuukkanen, 2007, p. 559) than the standard rationalist reading of Kuhn via single epistemological values, or to interpret Kuhn as a rationalist 'even to the extent' (ibid., p. 562) that he might have accepted a more general epistemological method of evaluation. To say that theory choices are made on the basis of coherentist criteria tells us more about the dynamics of scientific change than, for example, a claim that consistency or accuracy is one of the main cognitive factors behind scientists' theory choices. ...
... Among the accounts of epistemic justification that have been applied to the evaluation of scientific theories, coherentist approaches have been scoring fairly better than the foundationalist ones. 7 Thagard's explanatory coherentism has been applied to a number of scientific revolutions (Thagard, 1992), Chang has applied his epistemic iteration to the case of the invention of the concept of temperature (Chang, 2004), while Bonjour's coherentism (Bonjour, 1985;Bonjour, 1989) has been discussed with regard to the problem of theory choice in Kuhn's philosophy of science (Kuukkanen, 2007). Nevertheless, none of these accounts is fully suitable for theory evaluation in the context of pursuit. ...
... In a similar vain, it could be argued for the similarity between Kuhn's and Bonjour's criteria. For example, as already mentioned, (Kuukkanen, 2007) suggests that Kuhn's philosophical standpoint could be incorporated into a coherentist epistemology. Furthermore, according to Kitcher, "scientists in the thick of a controversy face two types of predicaments: those of inconsistency and those of explanation." ...
The aim of this paper is to offer an account of epistemic justification suitable for the context of theory pursuit, that is, for the context in which new scientific ideas, possibly incompatible with the already established theories, emerge and are pursued by scientists. We will frame our account paradigmatically on the basis of one of the influential systems of epistemic justification: Laurence Bonjour's coherence theory of justification. The idea underlying our approach is to develop a set of criteria which indicate that the pursued system is promising of contributing to the epistemic goal of robustness of scientific knowledge and of developing into a candidate for acceptance. In order to realize this we will (a) adjust the scope of Bonjour's standards –consistency, inferential density, and explanatory power–, and (b) complement them by the requirement of a programmatic character. In this way we allow for the evaluation of the "potential coherence" of the given epistemic system.
... El primer capítulo del libro, "Kuhn, Coherentism and Perception", a cargo de Howard Sankey (pp. 1 -14), explora la interpretación coherentista del pensamiento epistemológico de Thomas Kuhn, comenzando con el trabajo de Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen (Kuukkanen 2007). Sankey considera que la interpretación coherentista de Kuukkanen es prometedora, pero argumenta que tiene una limitación crucial: no demuestra que Kuhn rechace la justificación no doxástica en favor de relaciones de coherencia entre creencias. ...
Este texto es una reseña crítica del libro Perspectives on Kuhn. Contemporary Approaches to the Philosophy of Thomas Kuhn de Giri, L., Melogno, P., Miguel, H. (2023)
... Knowledge is viewed as a web where the justification of any belief depends on its relations to other beliefs, aiming to avoid the pitfalls illustrated by Gettier cases by focusing on the coherence of the entire belief system. Confronting these views has attracted significant attention as shown by BonJour (1985), Kuhn (1970Kuhn ( , 1977Kuhn ( , 2012, Kuukkanen (2007), Sosa (1980), andSankey (2023). ...
The primary aim in this discourse is to promote English as a generator of global nomenclature related to transdisciplinary knowledge. Its prevalent use can be enhanced by mitigating present ambiguities to facilitate uniform understanding, dissemination, and application of transdisciplinary knowledge The integration of transdisciplinary knowledge is highlighted as increasingly vital for comprehending complex problems, that transcend any single discipline. The suggested avenues for enhancement of global understanding and application of scientific concepts include the development of a unified transdisciplinary nomenclature, addressing the conceptual ambiguities. Additionally, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) introduces new dimensions to cognitive modelling and enhances interdisciplinary in spite of its limited capacity to replicate the nuanced aspects of human thought. This manuscript seeks to improve the transparency of knowledge-related nomenclature and concepts, on the basis of congruence between coherentism and transdisciplinarity. Through a philosophical lens, particularly within epistemology and the philosophy of science, this work aims to provide empirical insights into the conceptualisations in transdisciplinary contexts. Mitigating ambiguity in scientific discourse is pivotal for enhancing knowledge transfer and fostering more inclusive scientific dialogues and innovations.
... For correspondence theory of truth, seeKuukkanen, 2007;Lewis, 2001; Patterson, 2003. 8 For discussions of historical and demographic accounts of human longevity seeGurven & Kaplan, 2007; Wilmoth, 1998Wilmoth, , 2000 ...
The purpose of this article is to classify misrepresentations in big data. There are three major sources of misrepresentations: • Unintentional misrepresentations by surveilling governments and corporations (we call them as 'the twin big brothers') such as recording errors and sampling biases, • Intentional misrepresentations by the twin big brothers such as distortions and manipulations, • Intentional self-misrepresentations by data producers (i.e. internet users, consumers and citizens) such as faking data to protect oneself from harms to be inflicted by the health system or to protect right to privacy. This is a critical thought paper. Thus the methodology consists of philosophical discussions. The analyses in this article bring forth a new way to classify misrepresentations in big data, the notion of twin big brothers, the proposal to develop a new research area, datagraphy, and the notion of omniresistance. Against the big data optimists, this article clearly shows that the big data are corrupt from the very beginning due to the conditions set by surveillance capitalism. This article brings forth new concepts and conceptualizations with regard to big data. It is expected that it will move other researchers to reflect on and develop further the new ideas presented in this work.
... For correspondence theory of truth, seeKuukkanen, 2007;Lewis, 2001; Patterson, 2003. 8 For discussions of historical and demographic accounts of human longevity seeGurven & Kaplan, 2007; Wilmoth, 1998Wilmoth, , 2000 ...
In this book, our title is "The Latest Approaches in Communication Sciences". In the first part, the sociological origins of communication studies are revealed. The second part is a theoretical study: The thoughts of Tocqueville, Putnam and Bourdieu are examined. The third chapter focuses on a fairly new topic, artistic artificial intelligence. The fourth episode reveals the podcast panorama of Turkey. In the fifth section, we turn to cinemas and focus on brand placements. In the sixth chapter, mythology in marketing is discussed. The seventh chapter is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of a film. In the eighth chapter, the topic of hactivism is covered. With the ninth chapter, we move on to studies in English. This section examines the Coca-Cola case study. The topic of chapter 10 is organic markets. Chapter 11 deals with the surveillance society and Chapter 12 covers big data.
Dear readers,
I hope you enjoy these products of hard work. We conclude by saying “more books are on the line”.
Professor Ulaş Başar Gezgin
... We just want to be able to comment on the merits of the theory subsequent to which empirical results are found. Our interest in the ability to use results to comment on their authorizing theory descends from our assumption of a fairly naïve convergent realism handily described by Kuukkanen (2007). Specifically, we assume that there is an independent real out there for whose description we have not yet developed adequate theory or methods. ...
One challenge for those reading methodological debates in low consensus fields is determining the outcome when participants do not share standards. When parties to a debate do not agree on the standards to be used in assessing their arguments (i.e., quality), it may be useful to ask first if parties’ contributions meet their own expectations (i.e., integrity). Most protocols for review of qualitative research specify some form of quality assessment. These protocols normally require some test of internal coherence. Coherence is also relevant when describing the match between a rebuttal and the argument it answers. In 2019, Nursing Inquiry published a critique and rebuttal of the methods used by the Joanna Briggs Institute. In this essay, we attempted to use the Joanna Briggs Institute's own quality assessment standards to assess their rebuttal of this fundamental critique. We found it possible to use the Joanna Briggs Institute's own quality assessment standards to assess this rebuttal, and we found that JBI's rebuttal did not meet their own standards.
... Kuhn, for one, is widely considered as having dealt a decisive blow to foundationalism in philosophy of science (cf. Kuukkanen 2007, who suggests an interpretation of Kuhn's philosophy of science as a form of coherentism). ...
Review of J. Losee, The Golden Age of Philosophy of Science 1945 to 2000 (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
... Whereas normal science means linear accumulation of research results in a field (Petrovich, 2018), scientific revolutions are dramatic changes with an overthrow of established thinking (Casadevall & Fang, 2016). Preconditions for scientific revolutions are creative knowledge claims that disrupt linear accumulation processes in field-specific research (Kuukkanen, 2007). Bu et al. (2019) see the development of disruption indicators in the context of a multidimensional perspective on citation impact. ...
Recently, Wu, Wang, and Evans (2019) proposed a new family of indicators, which measure whether a scientific publication is disruptive to a field or tradition of research. Such disruptive influences are characterized by citations to a focal paper, but not its cited references. In this study, we are interested in the question of convergent validity. We used external criteria of newness to examine convergent validity: in the post-publication peer review system of F1000Prime, experts assess papers whether the reported research fulfills these criteria (e.g., reports new findings). This study is based on 120,179 papers from F1000Prime published between 2000 and 2016. In the first part of the study we discuss the indicators. Based on the insights from the discussion, we propose alternate variants of disruption indicators. In the second part, we investigate the convergent validity of the indicators and the (possibly) improved variants. Although the results of a factor analysis show that the different variants measure similar dimensions, the results of regression analyses reveal that one variant (????????5) performs slightly better than the others.
... Whereas normal science means linear accumulation of research results in a field (Petrovich, 2018), scientific revolutions are dramatic changes with an overthrow of established thinking (Casadevall & Fang, 2016). Preconditions for scientific revolutions are creative knowledge claims which disrupt linear accumulation processes in field-specific research (Kuukkanen, 2007). Bu et al. (2019) see the development of disruptive indicators in the context of a multidimensional perspective on citation impact. ...
Recently, Wu, Wang, and Evans (2019) and Bu, Waltman, and Huang (2019) proposed a new family of indicators, which measure whether a scientific publication is disruptive to a field or tradition of research. Such disruptive influences are characterized by citations to a focal paper, but not its cited references. In this study, we are interested in the question of convergent validity, i.e., whether these indicators of disruption are able to measure what they propose to measure ('disruptiveness'). We used external criteria of newness to examine convergent validity: in the post-publication peer review system of F1000Prime, experts assess papers whether the reported research fulfills these criteria (e.g., reports new findings). This study is based on 120,179 papers from F1000Prime published between 2000 and 2016. In the first part of the study we discuss the indicators. Based on the insights from the discussion, we propose alternate variants of disruption indicators. In the second part, we investigate the convergent validity of the indicators and the (possibly) improved variants. Although the results of a factor analysis show that the different variants measure similar dimensions, the results of regression analyses reveal that one variant (DI5) performs slightly better than the others.
... The advantage of the Bayesian approach, on the other hand, is to display more easily the conditionalization, which is necessary for explaining scientists' evaluation changes (see also Chen & Zhang 2006). Another alternative approach is Kuukkanen's (2007) coherentist interpretation of Kuhn. This reading is also compatible with mine, and, as Salmon's, helps to illuminate other interesting aspects of Kuhn's thought. ...
According to a widespread view, Thomas Kuhn's model of scientific development would relegate rationality to a second plane, openly flirting with irrationalist positions. The intent of this article is to clarify this aspect of his thinking and refute this common interpretation. I begin by analysing the nature of values in Kuhn's model and how they are connected to rationality. For Kuhn, a theory is chosen rationally when: i) the evaluation is based on values characteristic of science; ii) a theory is considered better the more it manifests these values; and iii) the scientist chooses the best-evaluated theory. The second part of this article deals with the thesis of the variability of values. According to Kuhn, the examples through which epistemic values are presented vary for each person, and for this reason individuals interpret these criteria differently. Consequently, two scientists, using the same values, can come to a rational disagreement over which theory to choose. Finally, I point out the limitations of this notion of rationality for the explanation of consensus formation, and the corresponding demand for a sociological theory that reconnects individual rationality with convergence of opinions.
... Thus, truth is a relation of correspondence between a belief, proposition or sentence (truth bearer) and the states of affairs to which it refers (truth maker). The problem is that (Kuukkanen, 2007) we do not have direct access to reality to determine whether particular propositions do in fact correspond. This has led to a range of alternative theories, or perhaps criteria, for truth (J. ...
Information systems are a strong and ever-growing discipline of enormous relevance to today’s informated world, and yet, as recent reviews have shown, there is still not an agreed and explicit conceptualization or definition of information. After an evaluative review of a range of theories of information, this paper develops and defends a particular theory, one that sees information as both objective and veridical. By objective, we mean that the information carried by signs and messages exists independently of its receivers or observers. The information carried by a sign exists even if the sign is not actually observed. By veridical, we mean that information must be true or correct in order to be information – information is truth-constituted. False information is not information, but misinformation or disinformation. The paper develops this theory and then discusses four contentious issues – information as objective rather than subjective; information as true or correct; information and knowledge; and information and the ambiguity of meaning. It concludes with a discussion of the practical implications of the theory.
... "[...] the realist typically understands truth as correspondence with reality" (p. 562) and the rest of Section 4 inKuukkanen, 2007). ...
The paper challenges a recent attempt by Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen to show that since Thomas Kuhn’s philosophical standpoint can be incorporated into coherentist epistemology, it does not necessarily lead to: (Thesis 1) an abandonment of rationality and rational interparadigm theory comparison, nor to (Thesis 2) an abandonment of convergent realism. Leaving aside the interpretation of Kuhn as a coherentist, we will show that Kuukkanen’s first thesis is not sufficiently explicated, while the second one entirely fails. With regard to Thesis 1, we argue that Kuhn’s view on inter-paradigm theory comparison allows only for (what we shall dub as) ‘the weak notion of rationality’, and that Kuukkanen’s argument is thus acceptable only in view of such a notion. With regard to Thesis 2, we show that even if we interpret Kuhn as a coherentist, his philosophical standpoint cannot be seen as compatible with convergent realism since Kuhn’s argument against it is not ‘ultimately empirical’, as Kuukkanen takes it to be.
... ] without a firm consensus, this more flexible practice will not produce the pattern of rapid consequential scientific advance [in which] development occurs from one consensus to another, and alternate approaches are not ordinarily in competition. (Kuhn 1977, p. 232) Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen (2007) acknowledges that, especially in his later work, Kuhn viewed the development of science as a strong tendency toward internal coherence resulting in a plurality as a sum of exclusive monisms; a fragmentation of science. 13 As such, antagonistic pluralism is the only standpoint which has an actual preference for a certain position on the tradeoff, whereas consensual pluralism opts for laissez-faire and agonistic pluralism sees it as a matter of negotiation. ...
Economics is a typical resource for social epistemology and the division of labour is a common theme for economics. As such it should come as no surprise that the present paper turns to economics to formulate a view on the dynamics of scientific communities, with precursors such as Kitcher (1990), Goldman and Shaked (1991) and Hull (1988). But although the approach is similar to theirs, the view defended is different. Maki (2005) points out that the lessons philosophers draw from economics can go either way depending on the model chosen. Thus, the aims of this paper are (1) to illustrate this flexibility by proposing an alternative model which assumes increasing returns to adoption in science rather than the decreasing returns present in the aforementioned contributions; and (2) to outline the implications of this view for scientific pluralism and institutional design.
Kuhn famously rejects that science progresses towards a uniquely true account of the mind-independent world. Yet he states that science progresses. Progress comes down to improved problem-solving. It is important to realize that Kuhn talks about the progress of scientific knowledge. This raises the question of in what sense exactly problem-solving is knowledge. This chapter then has two main goals. The first is to explain Kuhn’s account of problem-solving as growth in knowledge by redefining knowledge as knowledge-how instead of knowledge-that. By linking the discourse of scientific progress to recent epistemological debates, I argue that knowledge-how ought to be understood as an ability, and therefore, scientific progress as an improved ability to solve problems and accomplish other tasks of scientific practice. The second goal of this chapter is to assess this notion of progress in relation to the recent debate on the nature of scientific progress, which has been reinvigorated by Bird’s (2007) paper. It will be shown that the epistemological and functional accounts of progress are, in fact, compatible if only the classical definition of knowledge is replaced by its understanding as knowledge-how. This results in a new, epistemological-functional conception of scientific progress.
When Kuhn first published his Structure of Scientific Revolutions he was accused of promoting an “irrationalist” account of science. Although it has since been argued that this charge is unfair in one aspect or another, the early criticism still exerts an influence on our understanding of Kuhn. In particular, normal science is often characterized as dogmatic and uncritical, even by commentators sympathetic to Kuhn. I argue not only that there is no textual evidence for this view but also that normal science is much better understood as being based on epistemically justified commitment to a paradigm and as pragmatic in its handling of anomalies. I also argue that normal science is an example of what I call Kuhn’s program of revisionary rational reconstruction.
The article is a case study on the views of the famous T.S. Kuhn about the so-called Copernican revolution. Generally, Kuhn is presented as a very successful historian and philosopher of science: an author of world bestsellers. The division among his supporters, i.e. about so-called left-wing and right-wing Kuhnians, is recalled, and the fact that Kuhn himself vehemently dissociated from a large proportion of his adherents. It is also noted here, that in the last 30 years, in addition to abundant hagiographic literature on T. S. Kuhn, there have also been a few critical studies of Kuhn’s achievements. The rest of the article presents the author’s critical analysis of Kuhn’s views on the so-called Copernican Revolution, which formed the basis of Kuhn’s scheme of scientific development presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962); i.e. the world’s most famous monograph in social sciences and humanities so far. The criticism encompasses a genesis, content and reception of Kuhn’s views and the development of his interpretations. The analysis is carried out by the means of methodology of historical sciences and a scientific method, which the author describes as the hypothetico-deductive method of correspondence thinking. The criticism is based on the author’s current publications (developed here further on), which were sadly unnoticed by the researchers, although presented in the world center for the Copernican research, and are available on the Internet freely. This fact leads the author to the assumption that international Kuhnian research is underdeveloped seriously and that strong prejudices – barriers may exist in scientific circles, such as, e.g., primacy of number of citations (and other bibliometric indicators) over content analysis, the Matthew effect, the effect of alleged and actual scientific centers and peripheries, some mental remnants of the Cold War, as well as underdevelopment of scientific communication.
The field of management, generally, and the field/discipline of Information Systems share with many other fields and disciplines a strange ambivalence about a central concept in this digital age—namely that of information. In research work, and in publications, it seems perverse at the least to demand rigorous research methodology, rigorous literature reviews and rigorous reviewing procedures whilst fundamental terms—and information is just one such—are being used with quite different, and un-explicated, meanings.
It is quite unequivocal that Kuhn was committed to (some version of) naturalism; that he defended, especially in his later work, the autonomy of scientific rationality; and that he rejected the correspondence theory of truth, i.e., the traditional realistic conception of the world’s mind-independence. In this paper, I argue that these three philosophical perspectives form an uneasy triangle, for while it is possible to coherently defend each of them separately or two of them combined, holding all three leads to incoherence. Hence, the only option is to reject one of them in a way that is both compatible with Kuhnian historiography and philosophically fruitful. My purpose in this paper is not exegetical. My ambition is to sketch a coherent philosophical framework which does justice to Kuhn’s historiographical model for scientific change and avoids the philosophical costs of relativism and anti-naturalism. In particular, I argue in favor of the following interconnected positions: (1) Given the role of anomalies in Kuhn’s historiographical model, the latter satisfies the two fundamental conditions for acknowledging the mind-independence of the world: the ‘irreducibility condition’ and the ‘objectivity condition’, (2) Kuhn’s rejection of the notion of an ‘Archimedean platform’ does not entail that the truth-value of beliefs doesn’t play a role in the explanation of their change, (3) Adopting scientific realism is the only way to defend the autonomy of scientific rationality within a naturalistic philosophical framework. However, adopting realism leads to a liberal rather than an eliminative version of naturalism.
In his paper, “Kuhn, Coherentism and Perception,” Howard Sankey shows that Kuhn’s epistemology does not fit squarely in the coherentist framework, though some aspects of his theory are akin to that position. Sankey examines and then criticizes a previous work by Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen that argues that Kuhn’s work fits in well with a coherentist approach and with a realistic position in which the correspondence theory of truth is still defensible. I will not examine Kuukkanen’s argument here. I will only comment on Sankey’s qualifications on Kuhn’s alleged coherentism. In the first section I shall add some more details to Kuhn’s relation to the concept of “the given” that reinforce Sankey’s doubts concerning the thesis that the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions fits in with a coherentist account of scientific knowledge—though I also agree with Sankey (and Kuukannen) that a study of coherentist ingredients in Kuhn’s epistemology would bring insight. Even so, labeling Kuhn’s epistemological views as either foundationalist or coherentist goes beyond his original point of view. I shall devote the second section of this commentary to argue in favor of this thesis on the basis of an unpublished lecture by Kuhn in which he discusses his convictions in the theory of knowledge—which agree with his attack to convergent views of scientific progress —and their connection to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty.KeywordsH. SankeyT.S. KuhnL. WittgensteinCoherentismEpistemology
In the latter half of the twentieth century, foundationalist approaches to epistemology and philosophy of science were widely rejected in favour of holist and coherentist approaches. Kuhn may be regarded as a contributor to this anti-foundationalist tendency. In this paper, I wish to consider the extent to which Kuhn’s epistemological thinking was coherentist in nature. This is a task that has already begun in the work of Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen. However, I wish to go beyond Kuukkanen by raising a number of questions that he does not address. First, I present Kuukkanen’s coherentist interpretation of Kuhn. In the next section, I argue that the interpretation fails to show that Kuhn rejects non-doxastic justification in favour of coherence relations among beliefs. In the fourth section, I present a standard objection to coherentism that any adequate formulation of the doctrine must confront, the “input objection”. I then frame the objection in terms of Kuhn’s model. In the fifth section, I argue that Kuhn’s account of science is able to satisfactorily deal with the input objection. In the sixth section, I explore the relationship between Kuhn’s treatment of perception and the anti-foundationalist tendency that contributed to the rise of coherentism.KeywordsT.S. KuhnJ.M. KuukkanenCoherentismFoundationalismPerception
This article takes issue with Kuhn’s description of the ‘Aristotle experience,’ an event that took place in 1947 and that he retrospectively characterized as a revelation that instantly delivered to him the key concepts of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). We trace a certain transformation of this narrative over time: whereas it commenced from a description of his impression of disparity between the textbook image of science and the study of historical sources, Kuhn started to characterize it as a revelation after learning of the English translation of Fleck’s 1935 Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. This book anticipates many central Kuhnian claims. Kuhn read it as early as 1949, but never fully acknowledged it as a source of inspiration. We discuss four hypotheses concerning the possible influence of Fleck’s theory on Kuhn’s in light of the available evidence. We conclude that the degree of similarity between them is too great to be coincidental.
This article is exploratory and experimental. It starts from the premise that leadership scholarship is a site of disagreement, where mainstream claims are challenged by critical scholars. Some criticism focuses on conceptual clarity, and incorporates consideration of who should be categorised as a leader, and on what basis, and whether it is helpful to refer to ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’. The ‘new wave’ of critical leadership studies generates controversial questions relating to whether leadership exists or is in fact a myth that we have reified. The bulk of criticism directed at educational leadership challenges three mainstream knowledge claims – underpinned by what I call the causality belief, the leadership dependency belief, and the conceptual belief – and which are the focus of this article's analysis. While criticism of these knowledge claims is well-rehearsed, the article breaks new ground by analysing them through an epistemic justification lens to address the question: is educational leadership (still) worth studying? Represented by these three component beliefs, the mainstream educational leadership scholarship belief system is analysed within a frame derived from the philosophy of science, and draws on BonJour's coherentist theory of epistemic justification to apply a more structured assessment than has hitherto been achieved by critical scholarship.
Interpreting Kuhn provides a comprehensive, up-to-date study of Thomas Kuhn's philosophy and legacy. With twelve essays newly written by an international group of scholars, it covers a wide range of topics where Kuhn had an influence. Part I deals with foundational issues such as Kuhn's metaphysical assumptions, his relationship to Kant and Kantian philosophy, as well as contextual influences on his writing, including Cold War psychology and art. Part II tackles three Kuhnian concepts: normal science, incommensurability, and scientific revolutions. Part III deals with the Copernican Revolution in astronomy, the theory-ladenness of observation, scientific discovery, Kuhn's evolutionary analogies, and his theoretical monism. The volume is an ideal resource for advanced students seeking an overview of Kuhn's philosophy, and for specialists following the development of Kuhn scholarship.
This article tackles the problem of normativity in naturalism and considers it in the context of the philosophy of historiography. I argue that strong naturalism is inconsistent with genuine normativity. The strong naturalist faces a difficult dilemma. If he rejects any reliance on conceptual intuitions, his epistemic inquiries will not get off the ground. As a consequence, his analyses of historiography are, in effect, normatively irrelevant: any practice is epistemically as valuable as any other. Another option for the strong naturalist is to relax methodological requirements and accept that epistemic inquiries may begin with nonempirical conceptual reflection or a priori reasoning.
The aim of this paper is to offer an account of epistemic justification suitable for the context of theory pursuit, that is, for the context in which new scientific ideas, possibly incompatible with the already established theories, emerge and are pursued by scientists. We will frame our account paradigmatically on the basis of one of the influential systems of epistemic justification: Laurence Bonjour’s coherence theory of justification. The idea underlying our approach is to develop a set of criteria which indicate that the pursued system is promising of contributing to the epistemic goal of robustness of scientific knowledge and of developing into a candidate for acceptance. In order to realize this we will (a) adjust the scope of Bonjour’s standards—consistency, inferential density, and explanatory power, and (b) complement them by the requirement of a programmatic character. In this way we allow for the evaluation of the “potential coherence” of the given epistemic system.
The work aims to investigate the relationship between the ideas of Thomas Kuhn about scientific rationality and those related to the relationship between science and reality. In this sense, puts Kuhn’s anti-realism as an essential element of the theory of rationality developed throughout his work, relationship that must be corroborated by explaining how this anti-realism is rather an assumption of this theory of rationality than a necessary implication of the historical observations of Kuhn. In the end, the work hopes to make clear that any reading of this author that separates these two dimensions of his work runs the risk of ignoring the depth of his thought.
The narrativist turn of the 1970s and 1980s transformed the discussion of general history. With the rejection of Rankean historical realism, the focus shifted to the historian as a narrator and on narratives as literary products. Oddly, the historiography of science took a turn in the opposite direction at the same time. The social turn in the historiography of science emphasized studying science as a material and practical activity with traceable and documentable traits. This empirization of the field has led to an understanding that history of science could be directly describable from scientific practice alone without acknowledging the role of the historian as a constructor of narratives about these practices. Contemporary historians of science tend to be critical of science's ability to describe its object—nature, as it is—but they often are not similarly skeptical of their own abilities to describe their object: past science, as it is. I will argue that historiography of science can only gain from a belated narrativist turn.
The incommensurability of two theories seems to problematize theory comparisons, which allow for the selection of the better of the two theories. If so, it becomes puzzling how the quality of theories can improve with time, i.e. how science can progress across changes in incommensurable theories. I argue that in papers published in the 1990s, Kuhn provided a novel way to resolve this apparent tension between incommensurability and scientific progress. He put forward an account of their compatibility which worked not by downplaying the negative consequences of incommensurability but instead by allowing them to reach their natural end: a process of specialisation. This development in Kuhn’s thought has yet to be properly recorded but it is also interesting in its own right. It shows how a robust version of incommensurability—one which really does have severe negative consequences for scientists’ capacity to perform comparative evaluations of incommensurable theories—need make no puzzle of the progress of science.
This paper considers the legacy of Kuhn and his Structure with regard to the current history and philosophy of science. Kuhn can be seen as a myth breaker, whose contribution is the way he connected historical and philosophical studies of science, questioning the cumulativist image and demanding historical responsibility of the views of science. I build on Kuhn’s legacy and outline a suggestion for theoretical and philosophical study of history (of science), which can be subdivided into three categories. The first is the philosophical analysis of historical interpretation and its relation to the historical record. The second is ‘theoretical history’ in which one tries to infer philosophically relevant interpretations on the nature of science on the basis of historical evidence. The third is the conceptual reflection of the assumptions and implications of the contemporary historiography of science. At the end I suggest that theoretical and philosophical study of history offers a fresh way to make history and philosophy relevant to each other.
Šešelja and Straßer’s critique fails to hit its target for two main reasons. First, the argument is not that Kuhn is a rationalist because he is a coherentist. Although Kuhn can be taken as a rationalist because of his commitment to epistemic values, coherence analysis provides a more comprehensive characterisation of cognitive process in scientific change than any of these values alone can offer. Further, we should understand Kuhn as characterising science as the best form of rationality we have outside logic, which rules out algorithmic rationality and allows non-cognitive factors to play a role in theory change. Second, Šešelja and Straßer overemphasise the importance of a priori reasoning in Kuhn, which was only an alternative to his earlier historical-empirical approach. My suggestion is that Kuhn’s neo-Kantian historical cognitivism integrates the earlier empirical and the later a-prioristic orientations. According to it, that any understanding of the world is preconditioned by some kind of mental module that is liable to change, detected as a discontinuity in the historical record of science.
Up to the 1960s the prevalent view of science was that it was a step-by-step undertaking in slow, piecemeal progression towards
truth. Thomas Kuhn argued against this view and claimed that science always follows this pattern: after a phase of “normal”
science, a scientific “revolution” occurs. Taking as a case study the transition from the static view of the universe to the
Big Bang theory in cosmology, we appraised Kuhn’s theoretical approach by conducting a historical reconstruction and a citation
analysis. As the results show, the transition in cosmology can be linked to many different persons, publications, and points
in time. The findings indicate that there was not one (short term) scientific revolution in cosmology but instead a paradigm
shift that progressed as a slow, piecemeal process.
Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43833/1/11229_2004_Article_BF00485316.pdf
This book gives a systematic formulation of critical scientific realism by surveying varieties of realism in ontology, semantics, epistemology, theory construction, and methodology. According to the standard version of scientific realism, scientific theories are attempts to give true descriptions of mind‐independent and possibly unobservable reality, where truth means correspondence between language and reality. Critical realism adds to this view four important qualifications: our access to the world is always relative to a chosen linguistic framework (conceptual pluralism); all human knowledge about reality is uncertain and corrigible (fallibilism); even the best theories in science may fail to be true, but nevertheless, successful theories typically are close to the truth (truthlikeness); a part, but only a part, of reality consists of human‐made constructions (Popper's world 3). Niiniluoto combines Tarski's semantic definition of truth with his own explication of Popper's notion of verisimilitude, and characterizes scientific progress in terms of increasing truthlikeness. He argues in detail that critical scientific realism can be successfully defended against its most important current alternatives: instrumentalism, constructive empiricism, Kantianism, pragmatism, internal realism, relativism, social constructivism, and epistemological anarchism.
On this occasion, and in this place, I feel that I ought, and am probably expected, to look back at the things which have happened to the philosophy of science since I first began to take an interest in it over half a century ago. But I am both too much an outsider and too much a protagonist to undertake that assignment. Rather than attempt to situate the present state of philosophy of science with respect to its past — a subject on which I’ve little authority — I shall try to situate my present state in philosophy of science with respect to its own past — a subject on which, however imperfect, I’m probably the best authority there is.
The usual objection to the coherence theory of factual truth is that the linkage of coherence to truth is simply too loose for coherence to provide the definitive standard of truth. As Arthur Pap put it some years ago:
It is quite conceivable that the coherence theory is a description of how the truth or falsehood of statements comes to be known rather than an analysis of the meaning of “true”.... One might agree that a given statement is accepted as true in virtue of standing in certain logical relations to other statements; still it would not follow that in calling it true one means to ascribe to it those relations.1
Preface Note on the third impression 1. Logic of discovery of psychology of research? T. S. Kuhn 2. Against 'Normal Science' J. W. N. Watkins 3. Does the distinction between normal and revolutionary science hold water? S. E. Toulmin 4. Normal science, scientific revolutions and the history of science L. Pearce Williams 5. Normal science and its dangers K. R. Popper 6. The nature of a paradigm Margaret Masterman 7. Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes I. Lakatos 8. Consolations for the specialist P. K. Feyerabend 9. Reflections on my critics T. S. Kuhn Index.
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On this occasion, and in this place, I feel that I ought, and am probably expected, to look back at the things which have happened to the philosophy of science since I first began to take an interest in it over half a century ago. But I am both too much an outsider and too much a protagonist to undertake that assignment. Rather than attempt to situate the present state of philosophy of science with respect to its past — a subject on which I’ve little authority — I shall try to situate my present state in philosophy of science with respect to its own past — a subject on which, however imperfect, I’m probably the best authority there is.
As a number of you know, I’m at work on a book, and what I mean to attempt here is an exceedingly brief and dogmatic sketch of its main themes. I think of my project as a return, now underway for a decade, to the philosophical problems left over from the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
This essay contains a partial exploration of some key concepts associated with the epistemology of realist philosophies of science. It shows that neither reference nor approximate truth will do the explanatory jobs that realists expect of them. Equally, several widely-held realist theses about the nature of inter-theoretic relations and scientific progress are scrutinized and found wanting. Finally, it is argued that the history of science, far from confirming scientific realism, decisively confutes several extant versions of avowedly ‘naturalistic’ forms of scientific realism.
The positive argument for realism is that it is the only philosophy that doesn't make the success of science a miracle.
-H. Putnam (1975)
This book examines the future prospects for research in the natural sciences. Are the days of scientific discovery numbered? Is there good reason to think that natural science is approaching the completion of its work? Professor Rescher's thesis is that the latter-day prophets of doom are wrong, and that we actually confront not the termination of scientific progress but merely its slowing down. The author argues that if an exponentially increasing effort is required to maintain a relatively stable pace of scientific progress (as it has over the past century or so), then science is bound to enter a period of deceleration. It is argued that despite these somewhat harsh realities, the prospects of scientific progress remain literally limitless in principle. However, the facts indicate that the cost of scientific inquiry rises faster than the significant returns that it can yield, and hence a deceleration in scientific innovation will come about not only because of the ending of the frintier, but because of the increased difficulties of pushing it further out. The book concludes by providing an explanation of the reasons for the cost-escalation of scientific work.
I have been supposing that for the theory of reasoning, explicit belief is an all-or-nothing matter, I have assumed that, as far as principles of reasoning are concerned, one either believes something explicitly or one does not; in other words an appropriate "representation" is either in one's "memory" or not. The principles of reasoning are principles for modifying such all-or-nothing representations. This is not to deny that in some ways belief is a matter of degree. For one thing implicit belief is certainly a matter of degree, since it is a matter of how easily and automatically one can infer something from what one believes explicitly. Furthermore, explicit belief is a matter of degree in the sense that one believes some things more strongly than others. Sometimes one is only somewhat inclined to believe something, sometimes one is not sure what to believe, sometimes one is inclined to disbelieve something, sometimes one is quite confident something is not so, and so forth. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Why, despite his enormous influence in the latter part of the twentieth century, has Kuhn left no distinctively Kuhnian legacy? I argue that this is because the development of Kuhn's own thought was in a direction opposite to that of the mainstream of the philosophy of science. In the 1970s and 1980s the philosophy of science took on board the lessons of externalism as regards reference and knowledge, and became more sympathetic to a naturalistic approach to philosophical problems. Kuhn, on the other hand, started out with a strong naturalistic streak, employing non-philosophical disciplines, primarily psychology, in order to build his accounts of scientific change and the nature of observation and scientific thought. But by the 1970s Kuhn's work had taken on a much more purely philosophical, a priori, tone. His expla-nation of incommensurability moved from a psychological explanation to one embedded in the philosophy of language. Increasingly he gave his outlook a Kantian gloss. I suggest, none-theless, that Kuhn's most valuable contribution is to be found in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and not in his later work, and that the naturalistic direction of the former has important links with connectionist research in cognitive science that deserve further study.
The structure of empirical knowledge 565 rAuthor's personal copy Harman Change in view: Principles of reasoning
- L G Bonjour
Bonjour, L. (1985). The structure of empirical knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. J.-M. Kuukkanen / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 38 (2007) 555–566 565 rAuthor's personal copy Harman, G. (1989). Change in view: Principles of reasoning (2nd ed.)
Reconstructing scientific revolutions
- Cambridge
- P Ma Hoyningen-Huene
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hoyningen-Huene, P. (1993). Reconstructing scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kuhn: Philosopher of scientific revolution
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- R Read
Sharrock, W., & Read, R. (2002). Kuhn: Philosopher of scientific revolution. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Theory of knowledge Inference to the best explanation
- K P Lehrer
Lehrer, K. (2000). Theory of knowledge. Oxford: Westview Press.
Lipton, P. (2004). Inference to the best explanation (2nd ed.). London:
Routledge.
The essential tension
- Kuhn
Popper’s qualitative definition of verisimilitude
- Miller