Kuhn claims after a revolutionary change of theory, scientists need to write new textbooks to incorporate the new theoretical perspective. The revisions do not merely involve the addition of the new discoveries. The task involves some rewriting of the history of the discipline. Kuhn suggests there are parallels to Orwell’s 1984. The “new” history of a scientific field is written to emphasize the continuity through the change. This chapter examines the role Kuhn’s comparison to 1984 plays in his argument, and the significance of the rewriting of a discipline’s history after a change of theory. The process tells us something about both how scientists are trained to work effectively and the nature of the changes that occur during a scientific revolution.

What a scientific community holds to be its core beliefs change over time. Gilbert and Weatherall and Gilbert argue that a community’s core beliefs should be understood as a collective belief formed by a joint commitment and that these core group beliefs are difficult to change as it would require a new joint commitment to be formed. This chapter argues that the primary normative constraints on group belief revision are the weight of the evidence being considered by the group, and not the normative constraints that arise from joint commitments. This chapter sketches a positive view of how epistemic groups may respond to new evidence by looking to Kuhn’s own account of how crises arise and are resolved in science.

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.

This chapter offers a reading of a metaphor developed by Kuhn in the late 1960s and 1970s, most famously articulated in the Postscript to the second edition of Structure: to work through a revolutionary rupture, scientists on either side of the divide recognize each other as belonging to different language communities, and work to become translators. This chapter argues that not only has this metaphor been misunderstood, but its potential significance both for a Kuhnian view of scientific change and for the account of scientific communication that comes with it has been neglected. The process of becoming a translator poses challenges to the scientist commensurate with the duty of the translator not to transfer meaning, but to create it.

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.

For Kuhn, textbook science is both a misleading rational reconstruction and an actual driver of normal science. Ludwik Fleck’s account of how textbooks stabilize scientific collectives illuminates the latter. Auguste Comte’s distinction between the theoretical method of instruction, which presents science ahistorically as a system of rational conclusions, and the historical method of instruction, which presents science as a series of effects, illuminate the former. Current STEM textbooks still employ the theoretical method, which obscures the role of historical accident when theory choice is underdetermined by rules. Kuhn and his mentor James B. Conant, in contrast, promote a case study approach. In our new learner-centered educational paradigm, we will need a new textbook science, one that leaves actual books behind.

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 discusses whether the appropriation of Kuhnian thoughts by the so-called Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge is appropriate. In order to answer the question of appropriate appropriation, Kuhn’s and the Strong Programme’s stances on two “isms” are compared: relativism and naturalism. It is shown that the Strong Programme clearly goes beyond Kuhn and breaks more radically with philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, there are also philosophical continuities and similarities.

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.

Kuhn left many readers with the impression that his version of paradigm choice was not a process governed by reason. That impression was correct. This chapter examines the development of Kuhn’s thinking on paradigm choice during and after Structure, focusing on a philosophical challenge here called the “puzzle of promise”: how can paradigm choice be conceived of as rational if it is, as Kuhn claims, made in defiance of the evidence from problem solving? The chapter argues that later developments of Kuhn’s views elaborate a platform for solving this puzzle, but that he himself always clung to the view that paradigm choice is an arational process.