Assignment for March 22

Read: T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Second half of the book (not including the Postscript – we’ll get to that next week). If you need to conserve time and energy, read at least Chapters IX, X, and XIII. Again, Fay’s discussion of Kuhn can help if Kuhn himself baffles you. Again, there were lots of links to helpful web sites in my last message (and on my web site).

Some questions to consider:

1. In chapter IX, Kuhn compares scientific revolutions to political ones. How, according to Kuhn, are these two things similar, and how are they different?
2. What is Kuhn trying to say about the relationship between Newton and Einstein? What do earlier scholars seems to have said about that relationship, and why does Kuhn disagree with them?
3. Why does Kuhn refuse to say that Aristotle and Galileo interpreted the same thing (a pendulum) in different ways? Why does he insist on saying that they actually saw different things? (pp. 118-125)
4. According to a more traditional understanding of science, scientific revolutions lead to new interpretations of “observations that themselves are fixed once and for all by the nature of the environment and of the perceptual apparatus.” (Kuhn, p.120) Kuhn rejects this view, insisting that, in some sense, “after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world.” (p.111) What reasons does Kuhn give for thinking that the traditional view must be rejected? What is his view?
5. On p. 111, “after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world.” On p. 129, “Whatever he may then see, the scientist after a revolution is still looking at the same world.” Huh? Can we make sense of this?
6. Chapter XIII: In what sense does science make progress according to Kuhn? What conception of scientific progress does Kuhn think we can no longer hang on to? (How does an analogy with biological evolution help to explain this point?)