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The Recent Revolution in Geology and Kuhn’s Theory of Scientific Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Rachel Laudan
Rachel Laudan*
Affiliation:
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
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Extract

The 1960s witnessed a striking change in geology. Since at least the seventeenth century, one of the central problems of the subject had been the origin of the major irregularities of the surface of the globe—continents and oceans, mountain chains and ocean islands—irregularities that were not anticipated by most physical theories. Traditionally these features had usually been explained either as residual traces of events occurring during the very early history of the globe, or as the result of vertical movements of the earth’s crust, caused, for example, by changes in the heat budget. The last two decades have seen an end to all this. The vast majority of geologists now believe that these irregularities largely result from the lateral movement of thin rigid plates covering the earth, a theory now known as “plate tectonics”, but a theory which also has obvious parallels with the hypothesis of continental drift, in which it was postulated that continents can move laterally.

Type
Part VI. Philosophical Consequences of the Recent Revolution in Geology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1978 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1978 , 1978 , pp. 227 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I am indebted to David Hull for first raising with me the question of why drift was accepted in the continued absence of a mechanism. Richard Burian, Henry Frankel, Lorenz Krüger, Larry Laudan, Walter Pilant and Victor Schmidt all made helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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