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THE EXTRAEPISTEMOLOGICAL INFLUENCE OF KUHN’S STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS
Zoran Kurelić
; Fakultet političkih znanosti Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Sažetak
The text begins with Richard Rorty’s assessment that Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, along with Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, is the most important
philosophical book written in the English language in the twentieth century.
The author endorses this assessment, for it is impossible to think of a work
in the fields of philosophy or scientific history which had such a dramatic
agitating and inspiring impact on the public for which it was originally not intended.
Namely, although Kuhn addressed in his work primarily philosophers
and scientists engaged with natural sciences, the work was a source of major
and fruitful discussion which involved, or could not be overseen by, anthropologists,
sociologists, culturologists, political scientists, philosophers of morality,
linguists, legal experts and many others. The author puts forward some
of Kuhn’s epistemological ideas which were creatively elaborated, reworked
and recontextualized by non-epistemologists. The text is divided in two parts.
In the first part, the author briefly sketches Kuhn’s key concepts expounded in
Structure… (paradigm, normal science, revolution). In the second part, he sets
forth Richard Bernstein’s interpretation of Kuhn’s epistemology. The author
opts for this interpretation because Bernstein, in his judgment, demonstrated
better than any other philosopher that precisely the concept of incommensurability
is to be given credit for Kuhn’s enormous influence even beyond the
boundaries of philosophy and scientific history. Together with Bernstein, the
author concludes that incommensurability becomes a first-rate category of
political thought due to the fact that it stresses in a conceptually adequate and
analytically rigorous fashion the phenomenon of mutual understanding which
overrides the imperative of choosing some unique superior scientific theory.
Ključne riječi
epistemology; scientific revolutions; incommensurability; Kuhn; Bernstein
Hrčak ID:
57689
URI
Datum izdavanja:
30.6.2010.
Posjeta: 2.718 *