World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science by Paul Horwich (PDF)

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Thomas Kuhn is viewed as one of the most influential (and controversial) philosophers of science, and this re-release of a classic examination of one of his seminal works reflects his continuing importance. In World Changes, the contributors examine the work of Kuhn from a broad philosophical perspective, comparing earlier logical empiricism and logical positivism with the new philosophy of science inspired by Kuhn in the early 1960s. The nine chapters offer interpretations of his major work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and subsequent writings. The introduction outlines the significant concepts of Kuhn’s work that are examined and is followed by a brief appraisal of Kuhn by Carl Hempel. The chapters discuss topics that include: a systematic comparison of Kuhn and Carnap viewing similarities and differences; the disputation of absolute truth; rational theory evaluation and comparison; applying theory to observation and the relation of models in a new conceptualization of theory content; and interpreting Kuhn’s plurality-of-worlds thesis. The volume also presents four historical papers that speak to Kuhn’s views on lexical structures and concept-formation and their antecedents. The afterward, by Kuhn himself, reviews his own philosophical development, his thoughts on the dynamics of scientific growth, and his response to issues raised by the contributors and other interpreters of his work.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Magnificent. A splendid volume with state-of-the-art philosophical and historical pieces. Highly recommended.”—British Journal for the Philosophy of Science“The essays are fascinating and make visible, blow by blow, the evolving discussion of the nature of science.”—Leonardo“World Changes touches many facets of Kuhn’s legacy . . . a wide-ranging book that offers interesting reading for the historian as well as the philosopher.”—Erkenntnis About the Author Paul Horwich is professor of philosophy at New York University. He is the author of numerous books, including: Reflections on Meaning; From a Deflationary Point of View; and Meaning. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, among others.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Kuhn has been a pivotal thinker in the history of science. This book enhances his reputation. Well done, and excellent service.

⭐This much underrated volume is a collection of essays in honor of Thomas Kuhn, presented in a conference held on May 1990 at M.I.T. and then edited and published in 1993. The essays are about Kuhn’s philosophy of science which, contrary to popular belief, cannot be reduced to “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.While the first edition of “Structure” was published in 1962 and the second edition (which included the famous Postscript) was published in 1970, Kuhn died in the mid-Nineties. As surprising as it may sound to many, however, he hadn’t been already “intellectually dead” since the Seventies, that is since the publication of the second edition of “Structure”. Quite the opposite: he kept on writing and researching until the end and, as a matter of fact, he left an unfinished manuscript about what it was supposed to be his last book. (In his testament, Kuhn nominated prof. John Haugeland and prof. James Conant as editors of his unfinished book. Haugeland and Conant had already edited the volume “The Road since Structure” (Kuhn 2000), but after the premature death of the previous the task of editing Kuhn’s last book remained in the incapable hands of the latter, who hasn’t done a thing about it in almost 20 years – apart from denying the access to the manuscript to seriously interested scholars, while at the same time distributing photocopies among his favorite students, and only among them.)As witnessed by “World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science”, in 1990 few philosophers and historians of science were well aware of the progresses made by Kuhn and of the richness of his late and more mature work.Some of the highlights of the volume are:- a warm introduction by another famous philosopher of science, Carl Hempel, Kuhn’s colleague and old friend;- “Carnap, Kuhn, and the Philosophy of Scientific Methodology”, by John Earman, which is one of the very first “revisionist” accounts of the relationship between the “received view” of the Logical Positivism and the “new look” of the so-called historical philosophy of science, an issue which has recently been re-vamped and is gaining considerable momentum in numerous debates in the circle of HOPOS (History of Philosophy of Science);- “Remarks on the History of Science and the History of Philosophy”, in which Michael Friedman lays down the foundations of his idea of “relativized constitutive a priori principles”, to which he will give a fully fledged formulation in his more recent “Dynamics of Reason” (2001);- “Rationality and Paradigm Change in Science”, in which Ernan McMullin discusses whether Kuhn’s model of science really poses a threat to the idea of rationality, as feared by several commentators, and makes a famous distinction between “deep” and “shallow scientific revolutions”;- “Design for Experimenting”, in which Jed Buchwald argues that the conceptual structure of the knowledge on which scientists agree during the periods of normal science is implicit or even vague, and that what real scientists generally agree upon is the actual “practice” of science, rather than concepts and theories;- “Mediations”, by Norton Wise, in which theories, experiments and actual world are described as inextricably inter-related and, in turn, as constituting an inter-field “culture of science”;- “How We Relate Theory to Observation” in which Nancy Cartwright, the only female contributor to the volume, advances some ideas about the role of models in the application of scientific knowledge, which will be fully developed through the idea of (fable-like) “nomological machines” in “The Dappled World” (1999);- a famous paper by Ian Hacking, “Working in the New World: the taxonomic solution”, in which Kuhn’s late “taxonomic turn” is re-interpreted as a form of dynamic nominalism;- a 30-pages long conclusive commentary, in which Kuhn discusses every single contributions to the volume and anticipate on some of the main topics of his unfinished (and as for today unpublished) last book.This extremely interesting collection of essays is not just a series of discussions and interpretations of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. What they do, in fact, is to offer some insightful criticisms and some exciting ways to “apply” Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy which probably the same Kuhn would have not thought of.This book is a stimulating read, and it is surely more refreshing and “modern” than most of the recent secondary literature on Kuhn.

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