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Discussion: Kuhn's Evolutionary Analogy in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and “The Road since Structure”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Thomas A. C. Reydon  and
Paul Hoyningen-Huene
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Abstract

Recently, Barbara Renzi argued that Kuhn's account of scientific change is undermined by mismatches in the analogy that Kuhn supposedly draws between scientific change and biological evolution. We argue that Renzi's criticism is inadequate to Kuhn's account of scientific change, as Kuhn does not draw any precise analogy between the mechanisms of scientific change and biological evolution nor aims to argue that the mechanisms of scientific change and biological evolution are similar in any important respects. Therefore, pointing to mismatches between the central concepts that feature in the descriptions of the two phenomena simply misses the point of Kuhn's analogy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 77 , Issue 3 , July 2010 , pp. 468 - 476
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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