Kuhn and Scientific Practices

Joseph Rouse Wesleyan University Thomas Kuhn's philosophical work has helped initiate or reinvigorate many of the central themes in the philosophy of science over the past three decades. His claim that appropriate attention to history could decisively transform familiar philosophical of science views was of course prophetic. Kuhn's discussion of meaning change, incommensurability, and the interdependence of theory and observation occasioned both the rise of rationalist metamethodologies and the renewal of scientific realism. Constructivist sociologies of science and various social epistemologies also trace a lineage to Kuhn's discussion of normal science and the role of scientific communities in sustaining research traditions. The striking growth of philosophies of the special sciences was perhaps foreshadowed as well by Kuhn's reflections on the "ramshackle structure" of normal science in contrast to familiar presumptions of the theoretical unity of the sciences. Yet in my view, one of the most philosophically far2