This chapter examines the legacy of Kuhn’s Structure for normative philosophy of science. It begins with an examination of Kuhn’s normative methodology and his position that historical cases provide evidence for philosophical claims. Kuhn’s philosophical methodology is insufficiently articulated, and his utilization of case studies is subject to objections implied by Pitt’s dilemma of case studies. The chapter subsequently examines the post-Kuhnian methodological positions of Ian Hacking, Helen Longino, Michael Friedman, and Hasok Chang. These views suggest alternative methodological strategies in the history and philosophy of science (HPS) tradition for addressing normative issues. It concludes by articulating some outstanding methodological challenges for the pluralist tradition of HPS ? associated with the Stanford and Minnesota schools of philosophy of science ? that emerged in the 1980s and remains influential.

Normal science is one of the core concepts in Kuhn’s philosophy, and its implications have been the target of both critical approaches and friendly attempts at analytic elucidation. This chapter aims to clarify the role of normal science in Kuhn’s philosophy, showing that some basic features of normal science, such as problem solving and the lack of criticism toward basic commitments, lead to a successful explanation of scientific progress. To do this, the chapter examines normal science, emphasizing the main features of the concept, the role it plays in the notion of science defended by Kuhn, and how it allows us to articulate the social and cognitive dimensions of scientific practice.

This chapter revisits Thomas Kuhn’s argument about an essential tension between tradition and innovation as a driver of scientific progress. It shows that Kuhn’s argument builds on a number of assumptions about the practices of science that held for past science conducted by individuals working within isolated disciplines, and argues that it does therefore not necessarily hold for the increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary science we see today. Examining different types of organization into teams, the chapter discusses how changes in the granularity of collaboration affect Kuhn’s essential tension argument.

This chapter first discusses the use of history in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, arguing that he does not offer a grand historical narrative, does not practice integrated history and philosophy of science, and does not use historical examples as evidence for his philosophical model. The chapter then sketches an alternative account that draws on Wittgenstein’s concept of object of comparison, that is, a yardstick that is laid against reality to illuminate certain of its features. It then compares Kuhn’s model of science to Wittgenstein’s language games and claims that both, as objects of comparison, undermine an essentialist understanding of science and language, respectively. The chapter concludes by presenting the various ways Kuhn’s work has impacted the historiography of science.

Toward the end of his life, Thomas Kuhn came to know the then new historical literature that substantially revised our understanding of Rudolf Carnap’s ideas. He was so taken with the emerging parallels between his own work and Carnap’s that he said “if I had known about it, if I had been into the literature at that level, I probably would never have written Structure.” Kuhn’s statement here is truly remarkable. There are, of course, both similarities and differences between Carnap and Kuhn. The similarities suggest that their two views are open to some of the same significant challenges and criticisms. But the differences suggest how each can help the other to meet the criticisms posed.

During his PhD and afterward, Kuhn was close to heated debates concerning the creation of the National Science Foundation. These debates were wide-ranging, touching upon topics such as the value of “basic science,” the obligations of scientific institutions, and the status of the social sciences. Kuhn was involved via his mentor, James Conant, who was one of the most prominent voices in these debates. In Kuhn’s later writings, he gestures toward this intellectual context as influential in the early days of composing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This chapter takes a close look at Kuhn’s involvement and exposure to debates about science funding policy and their influence on the composition of Structure.

This chapter reconstructs Kuhn’s philosophy of measurement and data, paying special attention to what he calls the “fifth law of thermodynamics.” According to this law, there will always be discrepancies between experimental results and scientists’ prior expectations. The history of experiments to determine the values of the fundamental constants offers a striking illustration of Kuhn’s fifth law of thermodynamics, with no experiment giving quite the expected result. The chapter highlights the synergy between Kuhn’s view and the systematic project of iteratively determining the value of physical constants, initiated by spectroscopist Raymond Birge, which was ongoing when Kuhn joined Berkeley in 1956. The analysis sheds light on various underappreciated aspects of Kuhn’s thought, especially his notion of progress as improvement in measurement accuracy.

The influence of Kuhn’s Structure has been remarkably wide-ranging. The author was honored by the History of Science Society, the Philosophy of Science Association, and the Society for the Social Studies of Science, three very different academic societies. The chapter reviews the impact of Structure and the changing perceptions of its significance, one discipline at a time. It focuses on book reviews of Structure, some written soon after the book was first published, and others written as much as fifty years after its publication, in response to the publication of the fourth edition. It also discusses articles that reflect on the impact of the book and eulogies or appreciations of Kuhn marking his death in 1996.

11. Social theories develop and transform in and through dialogues that simultaneously take place in multiple interactions and dialogues between the creator of a theory and numerous other factors. They provide us with rich evidence of struggles and tensions between:

• creative individuals and powerful institutions dominated by political, ideological, and religious forces

• general patterns of thought in specific time periods due to cultural and historical influences (zeitgeist)

• creative individuals and audiences (peers, the public)

• creative individuals and their doubts, hopes, and imagined others.

Throughout these dialogues, we have observed responses to the question ‘who is the individual and what is society’, which dominated Moscovici’s thinking throughout his life. They also answered another query that he kept raising: ‘what is “social” about social psychology’ (Moscovici, 1972/2000, p. 54)? To that end, the theory of social representations and communication is approaching its goal. It has showed who the Self is and who Others are, and who is individual and what is society. By following this path, and by exploring in a holistic manner the dynamic and complex phenomena in daily practices, such as health, education, politics, and ecology, it has the potential of becoming an anthropology of modern culture.

Chapter 7 is concerned with the global strategy and structure of economic theory. After arguing that Thomas Kuhns and Imre Lakatos notions of paradigms and research programs are in some ways misleading and not sufficiently detailed to be immediately applicable to economics, chapter 7 sketches the structure and strategy of economics as an inexact and separate science and comments on the role of abstract general equilibrium theories in this enterprise. Crucial to the global structure of economics is the conviction that economic outcomes depend mainly on a small set of causal factors that typically capture the most important features of economic outcomes. Economic theories are inexact, because other causal factors are left out, but at a high level of approximation, they are complete, and their scope includes the whole of economic phenomena.

Science works in trajectories. Whether we look from an individual, institutional, or international perspective, we focus our efforts on certain scientific pursuits and omit others. In an ideal world, of course, our efforts would be omnific in nature, pursuing every conceivable scientific trajectory to understand the world with near-perfect precision. At some point, however, we are forced to make a choice to pursue path A or path B – limited by resources, attention, and time. Frustratingly, knowing which path is likely to be most fruitful is often highly unpredictable. On the bright side, this also makes the discovery of new knowledge exciting.

This essay argues that despite Quine and Kuhn’s reputation for bringing to a close the era of Carnap and logical empiricism as the dominating philosophy of science, Carnap, Quine, and Kuhn all share in rejecting traditional realist and anti-realist analyses of ontology. They all reject a version of what Putnam called metaphysical realism and then also resist making the move to an equally extra-scientific anti-realist position. For all of them, science itself is to be the final arbiter of what there is.

Modern science is systematic inquiry, not systematic knowledge. It cannot be defined by its method or by its metaphysics, since these are amended as inquiry progresses. The norms of science are therefore the business of science and represent empirical discoveries. Peirce’s conception of science is nontechnical and for that reason difficult: he identified it by its ’spirit’, a restless quest for concrete discovery fruitful of further discovery. Theory, then, is no longer the end of inquiry, a resting place, but is, instead, a means to further discovery. Whereas philosophical systems were meant to be coherent and comprehensive, a theory that grounds research cannot be complete and any incoherence in it is a stimulus, not a fatal flaw. But the pursuit of concrete knowledge requires specialization and an evolving network of specialists. Peirce reversed the usual deprecation of specialization: its aim is growth of a knowledge that transcends any individual consciousness.

This chapter investigates the conditions for dialogue between science and religion, and asks what makes dialogue possible or desirable. Sometimes, dialogue has simply amounted to theology and religion accommodating themselves to the sciences, and this can serve to reinforce unhelpful ways of categorising science and religion. Different models for dialogue are suggested by past relations between natural philosophy and religion, understood as formative practices (rather than proposition-generating activities). An alternative approach is also suggested by the problem of incommensurability, initially applied in different ways by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Alasdair MacIntyre to the relations between competing scientific frameworks, but which is also applicable also to science–religion relations. Thinking of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ in terms of historical traditions, to use MacIntyre’s expression, leads to a different understanding of their possible relationships. Historical and sociological descriptions of scientific and religious practices, in short, should play a more prominent role in our understandings of sciences, religions, and their relations.

This chapter suggests that the field of macro-finance is primed for a scientific revolution, or paradigm shift, in Kuhnian terms away from determinate modeling structures toward partially open ones that allow for novel Knightian uncertainty-related events, narrative dynamics, and the unanticipated structural change they engender. The chapter presents a discussion on recent developments representing aggregate behavior and outcomes in financial markets based on model ambiguity and intervallic change that is allowed to occur at times and in ways that would be difficult for any researcher to anticipate ex ante. The main findings of the preceding analyses of Chapters 4 through 12 will be woven into the discussion throughout. The modeling frameworks of Knightian Uncertainty Economics and Imperfect Knowledge Economics are discussed as potential approaches to be adopted in the post-paradigm shift in macro-finance.

Kuhn has been hailed as one of the main critics of logical positivism since the publication of Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But the image of science he criticizes in the published version of the book is not considered sufficiently clear and has left room for doubt as to whether or not positivism, rarely directly cited, is a real target of this criticism. In the first manuscript of the work, written in 1958, the traditional image of science becomes clearer due to the contrast Kuhn makes between science and art. This chapter shows that the traditional image of science that Kuhn presents through the contrast with art in the first manuscript is the same as the one logical positivists present in the contrast with philosophy, particularly in the context of one of their most important and characteristic ideas, the proposal of a scientific philosophy. This allows a proper assessment of the share of responsibility of logical positivism in the construction of the traditional image of science Kuhn criticizes and, thus, a better understanding of Kuhn’s relationship with positivism.

This Introduction provides a rationale for a collection of new paper on Thomas Kuhn. Scholarship on Kuhn has changed dramatically in the last 20 years for numerous reasons. First, scholars studying Kuhn no longer focus narrowly on Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Scholars have been giving careful consideration to Kuhn’s later work. Second, many scholars have been drawing on the vast unpublished resources at the Thomas S. Kuhn Archive at MIT. Third, with the 50th anniversary of the publication of Structure in 2012, there were quite a number of conferences held which led to the publication of a number of volumes reflecting on Kuhn’s impact in philosophy and history of science. These three developments have contributed significantly to our collective understanding of Kuhn and his theories of scientific change and scientific knowledge. Though Kuhn’s position in the philosophy of science can be difficult to gauge, by objective measures Kuhn’s impact is undeniable. Kuhn’s influence outside philosophy of science is also astounding, especially in the social sciences. So it is beyond dispute that Kuhn has had a profound and wide-ranging impact on scholarship.