Scientific Revolutions - Philosophy - Oxford Bibliographies

1/5/2020 Scientiﬁc Revolutions - Philosophy - Oxford Bibliographies
Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Nickles
LAST REVIEWED: 29 MAY 2019

LAST MODIFIED: 24 JULY 2012
DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780195396577-0048
Introduction
Scientific revolutions and the problem of understanding deep scientific change became central topics in philosophy of science with
Thomas S. Kuhn’s publication in 1962 of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (see Kuhn 1970, cited under General Overviews). Kuhn
attacked the received view of the logical empiricists and Popperians that scientific change is cumulative. He claimed that there have
been several revolutions since the so-called scientific revolution, including dramatic overturnings in the most mature sciences—with
more to be expected in the future. Kuhn’s more dynamic model of scientific development postulated the existence of occasional crises
that sometimes trigger full-scale revolutions that overthrow the old “paradigm” and replace it with a new one discontinuous or
“incommensurable” with the old one. He rejected the received views of scientific rationality and denied that even the most successful
sciences are progressing toward a final, representational truth about the world. By focusing on finished, “textbook” science, defenders
of the received view, he argued, presented an inadequate account of how scientific research is done, leaving unexplained the marked
difference between the mature natural sciences and the social sciences as well as the difference within a mature science itself between
“normal science” and the extraordinary research context of science in crisis. Kuhn and an entire generation of historically oriented
philosophers of science believed that philosophical models of science should be more naturalistic (not based on a priori normative
claims), more reflective of scientific practice, and thus testable against the history of science. Unlike the logicians of science, Kuhn
highlighted cognitive and social psychological factors and the importance of rhetoric in scientific decision making. In reaction, critics
questioned whether there have been any genuinely Kuhnian revolutions, accusing Kuhn of debunking modern science by portraying
science as subjective, irrational, and relativistic. Kuhn replied that he was not a relativist, that he was attempting to develop a new
account of scientific cognition and rationality, and that he was in effect trying to instigate a revolution of his own at the level of
metascience and even general epistemology. Virtually no expert fully accepts Kuhn’s model of science, but there is general agreement
that he posed some serious problems, including the problem of new theories: How can it be rational for scientists to reject a highly
developed and accomplished theory or research program in favor of a radical and undeveloped new approach? Kuhn’s work stimulated
a number of later developments in philosophy and in social studies of science more generally.
General Overviews
The primary philosophical overviews take the form of encyclopedia articles, especially online, updatable articles, of which Nickles 2009
is the most comprehensive. Others are listed under Reference Works. Kuhn 1970 is the most cited source on the topic of scientific
revolutions; it is the work that put the topic on the philosophical map, but it develops only Thomas S. Kuhn’s own account of scientific
revolutions rather than providing a general overview. Cohen 1994 is a thoroughgoing treatment of historical work on the so-called
scientific revolution during the period from approximately 1540 to 1700. Cohen 1985 considers the general topic of revolution in wider
cultural and temporal contexts, from a historian’s viewpoint, with a focus on concepts of scientific revolution. Suppe 1977, in addition to
articles by some of the principal figures, includes a long and valuable editor’s introduction and afterword that provide a widely cited
account of “the received view” and the developments that led to the new directions taken by Norwood Russell Hanson, Stephen
Toulmin, Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Imre Lakatos, and others as well as the new budget of philosophical difficulties that resulted.
Moulines 2008 provides a more recent survey of the development of modern philosophy of science written with an institutional
emphasis. Aside from Kuhn 1970, Thagard 1992 is the best and practically the only book-length treatment of scientific revolutions in
philosophy of science, in this case from a computational perspective. Kvasz 1999 is representative of various attempts to distinguish
different kinds of revolutions.
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Cohen, H. Floris. The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
The definitive study of historical treatments of the period now called “the scientific revolution,” that is, the birth of modern science from
Nicolaus Copernicus to Isaac Newton. Ends with chapters on the concept of the scientific revolution and on the structure of that
extended revolution.
Cohen, I. Bernard. Revolution in Science. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1985.

A comprehensive treatment of the idea of scientific revolution from Nicolaus Copernicus to the 20th century. For Cohen, a revolution
must be recognized as such by scientists and their contemporaries at the time it is happening and by present-day scientists and
science studies experts.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
The work that triggered philosophical interest in deep scientific change. Presents the concepts of “normal science,” “paradigm,” and
“paradigm change.” Appealing to the then new history of science, Kuhn attempted his own epistemological revolution via his treatment
of scientific problem solving. The first edition, published in 1962, lacks the important “Postscript—1969.”
Kvasz, Ladislav. “On Classification of Scientific Revolutions.” Journal for General Philosophy of Science 30.2 (1999): 201–232.
Distinguishes three major types of revolutions, colorfully termed “Russian,” “Franco-British,” and “American,” and compares this account
with Kuhn, Lakatos, Michael Crowe, and Joseph Dauben. Kvasz takes into account revolutions in mathematics as well as empirical
science.
Moulines, C. Ulises. Die Entwicklung der modernen Wissenschaftstheorie (1890–2000): Eine historische Einführung.
Hamburg, Germany: LIT Verlag, 2008.
A general history of the development of the modern philosophy of science in five stages: Ernst Mach’s first academic chair in
philosophy of science, early logical positivism, later logical positivism (with an emphasis on Karl R. Popper’s critique of it), the historical
turn and Kuhn, and the broadly modelistic stage still underway.
Nickles, Thomas. “Scientific Revolutions.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. 2009.
A long entry that treats most of the themes in this bibliography, including some attention to Continental European work and to recent
approaches that treat the sciences as engineered complex systems or as dynamic networks.
Suppe, Frederick, ed. The Structure of Scientific Theories. 2d ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
The introduction and afterword to this conference volume provide a detailed statement and critique of “the received view” and of the
holistic “worldview” philosophies that replaced it. Contains articles by such figures as Kuhn, Carl Hempel, Toulmin, Dudley Shapere,
Hilary Putnam, Achinstein, Bas C. van Fraassen, Jeffrey Bub, Patrick Suppes, and I. Bernard Cohen. First edition 1974.
Thagard, Paul. Conceptual Revolutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Surveys problems of conceptual change and conceptual reorganization, then develops Thagard’s account of revolutionary theory
choice in terms of greater explanatory coherence, applying his Explanatory Coherence Harmony Optimization (ECHO) program to
several historical revolutions: Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Charles Darwin, plate tectonics, and so forth. Explores the question of
revolutions in psychology and in child development.
Reference Works
There now exist a number of valuable reference works, including online encyclopedias, that permit the revision of extant articles as well
as the addition of new ones. Searching for keywords, such as “scientific revolution,” “incommensurability,” “objectivity,” and “scientific
realism,” in these online resources will return useful information plus additional references. The items cited here are major sources and
are trustworthy as far as academic articles relevant to the controversial topic of scientific revolutions can be. The two best
encyclopedias of philosophy by far are the Routledge Encyclopedia (Craig 1998), available both in book form and online through
subscription or library access, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is free online. The latter’s articles are generally
much longer and more comprehensive. Also worth consulting are Borchert 2005, which is quite extensive, and the online Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Sarkar and Pfeifer 2006 is a valuable collection of articles on issues specific to philosophy of science.
Hackett, et al. 2008 and Jasanoff, et al. 1995 are cited because some philosophers working on these issues increasingly see
themselves as an integral part of the larger science studies community. Early hostile relations between philosophers of science and
sociologists of science have more recently given way to limited cooperation, especially in philosophy of biology. See The Science Wars
for additional references.
Borchert, Donald, ed. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 10 vols. Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2005.
Includes entries on scientific revolutions, scientific realism, scientific method, reduction, and logical positivism and on major figures,
such as Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap, Karl R. Popper, Thomas S. Kuhn, and Imre Lakatos.
Craig, Edward, ed. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1998.
Excellent, comprehensive encyclopedia of philosophy with entries or entry sections on many subjects, including confirmation theory,
empiricism, French philosophy of science, incommensurability, Thomas S. Kuhn, logical positivism, quantum logic, rationality, realism,
reduction, relativity theory, revolutions, scientific method, theories, underdetermination, unity of science, and more. Available online by
subscription.
Hackett, Edward, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, eds. The Handbook of Science and Technology
Studies. 3d ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
Scientific revolutions have not been a central topic of social studies of science (“science studies” other than philosophy of science). This
edition includes articles by the philosophers Miriam Solomon and Ronald Giere as well as other items relevant to the issues raised by
Thomas S. Kuhn’s work.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The section Philosophy of Science includes articles on confirmation and induction, Henri Poincaré, and Karl R. Popper.
Jasanoff, Sheila, Gerald Markle, James Petersen, and Trevor Pinch, eds. Handbook of Science and Technology Studies.
Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1995.
Michel Callon’s entry captures the flavor of sociological treatments of the dynamics of scientific change, but other articles are relevant.
Social studies of science and technology place more emphasis on local scientific practices than philosophers usually do and blurs the
traditional distinctions between science and technology and between internal and external factors.
Sarkar, Sahotra, and Jessica Pfeifer, eds. The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia. 2 vols. New York: Routledge, 2006.
A valuable, up-to-date source that includes entries on incommensurability, scientific change, scientific revolutions, underdetermination
of theories, realism, rational reconstruction, reductionism, Bayesianism, empiricism, and other relevant subjects.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Includes excellent, accessible, often lengthy and detailed entries with extensive bibliographies. Entries on scientific revolutions, Thomas
S. Kuhn, Otto Neurath, Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap, Carl Hempel, Karl R. Popper, incommensurability, intertheory relations in
physics, scientific progress, realism, empiricism, and many related topics.
Textbooks
Philosophy does not have many standard textbooks aside from those on logic and introductory philosophy. However, the items in this
section are especially useful for college courses as well as the general reader. The same is true of Kuhn 1970 (cited under General
Overviews) and Scheffler 1967 (cited under First Responses to Kuhn). Andersen 2001 is an excellent supplement to Kuhn 1970.
Bowler and Morus 2005 is a standard text for beginning history of science courses and a good supplementary book for philosophy of
science courses. Godfrey-Smith 2003 is an excellent text with a philosophy of biology emphasis, while Giere 1988 has a physics
emphasis and introduces the author’s concept of models, broadly inspired by Thomas S. Kuhn’s work. Both of the latter books engage
wider social studies of science issues as well. Hacking 1981 is useful for providing key original papers that are fairly accessible to a
wide audience. Kitcher 1993 develops Philip Kitcher’s overall position in philosophy of science, including major attention to issues of
conceptual change, and it is useful as a text in more advanced courses. Frank Pajares’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: Outline
and Study Guide is an online source that helps students follow the most important lines of thought in Kuhn 1970, and Preston 2008
does the same in a much richer manner.
Andersen, Hanne. On Kuhn. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001.

A short, accessible, and accurate treatment of Thomas S. Kuhn and his work by one of the authorities on Kuhn’s work. Andersen is
especially interested in Kuhn’s theory of cognition. See also Andersen, et al. 2006 (cited under Responses to Kuhn’s Theory of
Cognition).
Bowler, Peter J., and Iwan Rhys Morus. Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005.
Two fine historians of science provide a five-hundred-page survey of the modern history of science focusing on major developments in
physics, cosmology, chemistry, biology, geology, and the human sciences, asking in each case: Was it a revolution in Thomas S. Kuhn’s
sense?
Giere, Ronald. Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Useful as a student textbook but also cited often in scholarly papers. Friendly to Thomas S. Kuhn’s naturalistic attempt to integrate
cognitive science and sociology of science into a philosophical account of scientific cognition. Focuses on the relation of abstract
models to experiments in physics and on the plate tectonic revolution in geology.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003.
One of the best basic introductions to philosophy of science, pitting Thomas S. Kuhn against Karl R. Popper and the logical empiricists
with a philosophy of biology emphasis in the examples used. Includes a discussion of framework approaches, feminist philosophy of
science, sociology of science, realism, naturalism, explanation, and Bayesianism.
Hacking, Ian, ed. Scientific Revolutions. Oxford Readings in Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Although it could be classified as a short anthology, this book is a useful text in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series. Contains
reprints of key pieces by major players: Thomas S. Kuhn, Dudley Shapere, Hilary Putnam, Karl R. Popper, Imre Lakatos, Ian Hacking,
Laurens Laudan, and Paul Feyerabend.
Kitcher, Philip. The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993.
Develops Kitcher’s naturalistic, modestly realist position. Can serve as a textbook for graduate students and upper-level
undergraduates. Rejects older accounts of scientific rationality and develops a model combining individual and social interests and an
influential model of explanation. Steers between extreme continuity and discontinuity conceptions of conceptual change.
Pajares, Frank. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: Outline and Study Guide.
Not a book but a useful online text-related resource: a detailed outline of every chapter of Kuhn 1970 (cited under General Overviews).
Preston, John. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum, 2008.
A useful summary of Thomas S. Kuhn’s model of scientific development in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and of the
controversies it inspired. Includes stimulating study questions for each of Kuhn’s chapters.
Anthologies
Gutting 1980 was the first major anthology on Thomas S. Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions. Nickles 2003 also focuses entirely on
Kuhn, early and late, with emphasis on Kuhn’s theory of cognition to the neglect of social theory, except for the Barry Barnes chapter. In
Horwich 1993 the focus is on Kuhn’s late work. Suppe 1977 (cited under General Overviews) includes a discussion of Kuhn’s work as
well as Frederick Suppe’s lengthy and now-classic introduction and afterword surveying the history of the modern philosophy of
science. Donovan, et al. 1988 also provides an extensive background account as well as numerous contributions that test various
tenets of models of scientific change against history. Newton-Smith 2000 and Psillos and Curd 2008 are good examples of general
anthologies containing chapters or sections relevant to controversies concerning scientific change. Lange 2007 is an excellent and up-
to-date anthology that includes several papers relevant to issues of conceptual change and rational theory choice. For example, Wesley
Salmon’s paper “Tom Kuhn Meets Tom Bayes” is important not only for the great interest in Bayesian confirmation theory and the
challenge it faces to solve the problem of new theories (see General Overviews), but also because Kuhn was hardly a fan of standard
confirmation theory. Galison and Stump 1996 is a large and diverse collection of papers by experts from all major areas of science
studies, including philosophy of science. The volume represents how far these fields have come from the received view of science with
its emphasis on unity of science.
Donovan, Arthur, Larry Laudan, and Rachel Laudan, eds. Scrutinizing Science: Empirical Studies of Scientific Change.
Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1988.
Conference volume with a long introductory essay outlining an extensive program to test “guiding assumptions” in models of scientific
change against the record of history of science, followed by sixteen contributions that test a variety of claims against developments in
many different sciences.
Galison, Peter, and David J. Stump, eds. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1996.
Explores the meaning of unity/disunity both in historical time and in “space” (diversity at a given time). Galison, whose chapter on
trading zones bears directly on interpretation, translation, incommensurability, and frameworks, insightfully introduces the contributions
of Ian Hacking, Donald Davidson, John Dupré, Richard Creath, Steve Fuller, Mario Biagioli, Simon Schaffer, Arthur Fine, David J.
Stump, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Alison Wylie, and others.
Gutting, Gary, ed. Paradigms and Revolutions: Appraisals and Applications of Thomas Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science. Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980.
Contains contributions from authors in several academic fields, including Rachel Laudan on the plate tectonic revolution, John C. Green
on the Darwinian revolution, and contributions from Dudley Shapere, Alan Musgrave, Alasdaire MacIntyre, Wolfgang Stegmüller, M. D.
King, Douglas Lee Eckberg and Lester Hill Jr., Mark Blaug, Sheldon Wolin, David Hollinger, Ian Barbour, Richard Vernon, and Michael
Heidelberger.
Horwich, Paul, ed. World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
A volume celebrating Kuhn’s career. Includes pieces by Carl Hempel, John Earman, Michael Friedman, Ernan McMullin, J. L. Heilbron,
N. M. Swerdlow, Jed Z. Buchwald, M. Norton Wise, Nancy Cartwright, and Ian Hacking with a long afterword by Kuhn commenting on
the papers.
Lange, Marc. Philosophy of Science: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

A large and diverse collection containing relevant pieces by Kuhn (“Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice”), Wesley Salmon
(“Tom Kuhn Meets Tom Bayes”), and Philip Kitcher on Charles Darwin’s achievement and entire sections on scientific realism and
underdetermination, theory choice, and belief revision.
Newton-Smith, William, ed. A Companion to the Philosophy of Science. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
A large collection containing articles on Kuhn (by Richard Rorty, who regards Kuhn as having shown that the sciences are cultural
enterprises like any other); scientific change (by Dudley Shapere); incommensurability, models, and analogies (by Mary Hesse); Karl R.
Popper; Imre Lakatos; logical positivism; relativism; theoretical terms; and more.
Nickles, Thomas, ed. Thomas Kuhn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Includes articles by Michael Friedman; Gary Gutting; John Worrall; Joseph Rouse; Barry Barnes (on the problem of social order);
Thomas Nickles; Nancy J. Nersessian; Peter Barker, Xiang Chen, and Hanne Andersen; Richard E. Grandy; and Helen Longino, all
relevant to the topic of scientific revolutions and related issues, such as frameworks, incommensurability, and relativism.
Psillos, Stathis, and Martin Curd, eds. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science. London: Routledge, 2008.
A comprehensive anthology that includes highly relevant items by Peter Achinstein, Alexander Bird, Michael Devitt, Gerald Doppelt,
Igor Douven, Steven French, Alan Hájeck and James M. Joyce, Colin Howson, Gurol Irzik, Peter Lipton, Howard Sankey, Sahotra
Sarker, Elliott Sober, Paul Teller, Thomas Uebel, John Worrall, and others.
Bibliographies
The best sources of bibliographies are the survey articles mentioned under Reference Works and the books about Thomas S. Kuhn.
Cohen 1985 includes an extensive bibliography of the literature on scientific revolution to that date. Nickles 2009 (cited under General
Overviews) includes a fairly extensive bibliography with a philosophical focus. Hoyningen-Huene 1993 and Kuhn 2000 contain complete
bibliographies of Kuhn’s publications. Literaturliste zum Thema Incommensurabilität, supervised by Paul Hoyningen-Huene, is the most
extensive bibliography of work on incommensurability. Gattei 2008 (cited under Later Philosophical Responses to Kuhn) is also
especially helpful. Fuller 2000 (cited under Later Philosophical Responses to Kuhn) contains an extensive bibliography of materials
relevant to the Kuhn–Karl R. Popper debate over the proper relation of science to society.

A comprehensive treatment of the idea of scientific revolution from Nicolaus Copernicus to the 20th century. For Cohen, a revolution
must be recognized as such by scientists and their contemporaries at the time it is happening and by present-day scientists and
science studies experts.
Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Still the most thoroughgoing treatment of all aspects of Kuhn’s book, written in close discussion with Kuhn himself and, in this sense,
the only “authorized” treatment of Kuhn.
Hoyningen-Huene, Paul, comp. Literaturliste zum Thema Incommensurabilität. Hannover, Germany: Institut für Philosophie.
An extensive bibliography of everything (or practically everything philosophy related) written on incommensurability to the year 2000
from the Zentrale Einrichtung für Wissenschaftstheorie und Wissenschaftsethik (Center for Philosophy and Ethics of Science), Leibniz
Universität Hannover.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993. Edited by James Conant and John Haugeland.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
A collection of Kuhn’s essays spanning most of his philosophical career, including the title essay, “What Are Scientific Revolutions?”
“Rationality and Theory Choice,” “Reflections on My Critics” (from 1970), and the long, informative interview with Aristides Baltas,
Kostas Gavroglu, and Vasso Kindi near the end of his life.
Journals
There are no journals specializing in the topic of scientific revolutions. Scattered articles in philosophy of science journals (and other
science studies journals) deal with relevant topics. Such journals include the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Historical
Studies in the Natural Sciences, Journal for General Philosophy of Science, Metascience, Perspectives on Science, Philosophy of
Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, and Synthese. A special issue of Erkenntnis features the most popular formal
approach after the fall of logical empiricism, namely the model-based approach of Joseph Sneed, further developed by Wolfgang
Stegmüller and the structuralist school, including C. Ulises Moulines. Given his suspicion of formalist approaches, Thomas S. Kuhn’s
positive response to Stegmüller’s Theorie und Erfahrung (Stegmüller 1973, cited under Contributions in German) was surprising.
Mitchell 2003, a special issue of Philosophy of Science, contains a series of papers on realism and the antirealism inspired by Kuhn’s
work and by the negative historical induction of Laudan 1981 (cited under Scientific Realism). The same goes for the Journal for
General Philosophy of Science. The latter journal includes many articles in German and, like Synthese, has a higher percentage of
mainland European contributions than the others. Gattei 2003, a special issue of Social Epistemology, contains multiple reviews of
Steve Fuller’s unflattering treatment of Kuhn’s work (see Fuller 2000, cited under Later Philosophical Responses to Kuhn),
characterizing Kuhn as a Cold War elitist whose conception of science worsened the problem of how to integrate scientific expertise
with an open, democratic society. Soler 2008, a symposium in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, explores the question:
How robust are empirical scientific results to actual and possible historical contingencies? At the meta level we can ask a similar
question about overall patterns of historical development of a science. Historical and epistemological approaches such as Kuhn’s imply
considerable contingency and a greater degree of social constructionism than is compatible with strong realist accounts of science, yet
Kuhn himself imposed upon the history of mature sciences (up to World War II at least) a rigid framework of normal-revolutionary phase
changes that is in some sense not contingent. Rowbottom and Bueno 2011 represents the early 21st-century stage of the debate over
whether the long and venerable tradition of empiricism in epistemology remains viable, especially given what we now know about
revolutionary developments in the sciences. The focus is on Bas C. van Fraassen’s attempt to formulate a viable empiricism in terms of
a new concept of “stance,” one that seems inspired by Kuhn on disciplinary matrices.
Erkenntnis 10.2 (July 1976).

A series of papers on the set-theoretical, model-based structuralist approach of Joseph D. Sneed and Wolfgang Stegmüller. Papers by
Sneed, Stegmüller, and Moulines plus Kuhn’s positive response. The resemblance that antiformalist Kuhn saw to his own view was
surprising. Structuralism remains a major formal approach, especially on the Continent. Available online by subscription.
Gattei, Stefano, ed. Special Issue: Fuller’s Study of the Philosophy of Thomas S. Kuhn. Social Epistemology 17.2–3 (2003).
Contributors to this special issue include Joseph Agassi, Babette Babich, Nimrod Bar-Am, Barry Barnes, Pierluigi Barrotta, Alexander
Bird, Kenneth Caneva, Randall Collins, Steven French, Jagdish Hattiangadi, David Hollinger, Ian Jarvie, Hans Siggaard Jensen,
Stafania Jha, Vasso Kindi, Peter Lipton, Howard Margolis, Philip Mirowski, Gonzalo Munévar, Peter Munz, John Preston, George
Reisch, Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Roberto Torretti, Thomas Uebel, John Wettersten, Petri Ylikoski, and others.
Journal for General Philosophy of Science 42.1 (2011).

Continued in Journal for General Philosophy of Science 42.2 (2011). Both issues contain several articles relevant to the issues of this
bibliography, especially issues concerning realism versus relativism and underdetermination. Articles by Holger Andreas, Michael
Devitt, Seungbae Park, Howard Sankey and Dimitri Ginev, Gerald D. Doppelt, Timothy D. Lyons, and Stathis Psillos on the realism
debate; Thomas Uebel on Rudolf Carnap and Kuhn; and Markus Seidel on Ludwik Fleck. Articles available online for purchase or by
subscription.
Mitchell, Sandra D., ed. Special Issue: Proceedings of the 2002 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association:
Contributed Papers. Philosophy of Science 70.5 (December 2003).
A set of papers on realism. Anjan Chakravartty critiques structural realism, Ioannis Votsis defends Russell’s early version of structural
realism, Timothy Lyons argues against realist explanations of the success of science, Hasok Chang criticizes “preservative realism,”
and Kyle Stanford rejects the realists’ “selective confirmation” strategy from historical cases.
Rowbottom, Darrell, and Otávio Bueno, eds. Special Issue: Stance and Rationality: A Perspective. Synthese 178.1 (2011): 1–
169.
Special issue edited by Darrell Rowbottom and Otávio Bueno on Bas C. van Fraassen’s voluntaristic stance on empiricism in The
Empirical Stance (van Fraassen 2002, cited under Problems of Empiricism). Includes pieces by Rowbottom and Bueno, Matthias
Steup, Baumann, Anjan Chakravartty, Paul Teller, Jon Williamson, James Ladyman, E. J. Lowe, Matthew Ratcliffe, Ward E. Jones, and
Alan Richardson with a reply by van Fraassen. Articles available online by subscription.
Soler, Léna. Special Issue: Science and the Changing Senses of Reality, circa 1900. Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science, Part A 39.3 (2008): 221–264.
Symposium edited by Léna Soler. Soler defines the issues and favors contingency in terms of an alternative physics thought
experiment, Allan Franklin defends moderate inevitability, Emiliano Trizio compares scientific history with actual and possible human
histories, and Howard Sankey explores the relations between various forms of scientific realism and inevitability. Articles available
online for purchase or by subscription.
History of the Idea
Since Nicolaus Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543) the term “revolution” has been used with various meanings,
sometimes sociopolitical, often technical scientific, and sometimes epistemological. It became a political term in 17th-century England,
then gradually reentered the scientific terminology in descriptions of scientific developments perceived to be dramatic advances. During
the decades around World War II, the work of Alexandre Koyré (on Galileo’s Platonist approach to natural philosophy) and a few other
historians and philosophers (see Burtt 2010) opposed the dominant, strongly empiricist-inductivist-positivist view that science is (or
should be) driven almost entirely by factual discoveries as opposed to conceptual hypotheses and frameworks with metaphysical
underpinnings. Butterfield 1949, by a political historian and composed from secondary sources rather than original scholarship,
emphasizes that empirical observations require interpretation within a conceptual framework. This book helped popularize talk of
scientific revolutions and influenced Thomas S. Kuhn, who used the book as a text in courses he taught. Cohen 1994 is the best
treatment to that date of historical work on the scientific revolution. Koyré 1978 and Dijksterhuis 1961 are classical examples of such
work, and Dear 2009 is a good, more recent example. Cohen 1985 is an extensive scholarly exploration of the meaning of “scientific
revolution.” Gillispie 1960 is a good example of the new history of science in transition: excellent scholarship hindered by an
Enlightenment conception of history that in effect makes the sciences exceptional, standing outside the rest of human culture. Kuhn
regarded such historiography as retaining a whiff of Whiggism, the mistake of evaluating past scientific practices as progressive or not,
depending on whether they agree with present-day science.
Burtt, Edwin. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science. Charleston, SC: BiblioLife, 2010.
A dated but classic discussion of the change in metaphysical assumptions underlying the scientific revolution. Widely viewed as an
antidote to positivist-inductivist models of science and as introducing the idea of a metaphysics-inspired scientific research program.
Originally published in 1924; revised in 1932 as The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).
Butterfield, Herbert. The Origins of Modern Science: 1300–1800. London: Bell, 1949.
Features the scientific revolution and its influence, including “the postponed revolution in chemistry.” Butterfield thought of revolutions,
in Enlightenment fashion, as foundings of modern sciences, but he rejected simple empiricism. Later analysts, including Kuhn, found
insightful his metaphor of scientists making conceptual breakthroughs by “picking up the other end of the stick” (p. 129).
Cohen, H. Floris. The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
A detailed guide to scholarly treatments of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, including those by Edwin Burtt, Alexandre Koyré, E. J.
Dijksterhuis, Herbert Butterfield, the Halls, Thomas S. Kuhn, and many more. Some consideration of the idea of revolution and the use
of the term “revolution” by scholars.

Explores the historical and philosophical use of the terms “revolution” and “scientific revolution” more comprehensively than Cohen
1994. For I. Bernard Cohen, a revolution must be highly visible to experts both when it occurs and in the accounts of later scientists and
scholars.
Dear, Peter. Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700. 2d ed. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2009.
A compact treatment of the scientific revolution as a natural development out of medieval and Renaissance work. Major attention to the
emergence of experiment as an authoritative scientific and cultural process of inquiry and as a basis for general claims about the
universe.
Dijksterhuis, E. J. The Mechanization of the World Picture. Translated by C. Dikshoorn. Oxford: Clarendon, 1961.
A dated but classic account of the origins of mechanics from the Greeks, through the Middle Ages, to the 17th century and Isaac
Newton. English translation of Mechanisering van het wereldbeeld (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1950).
Gillispie, Charles. The Edge of Objectivity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960.
Represents the academic history of science in transition, retaining Enlightenment views of scientific development as the moving edge of
objectivity, compatible with Herbert Butterfield’s limitation of revolutions to foundings of modern sciences. On their accounts, later
revolutions are hardly possible once objective investigation of nature takes over, providing objective facts and warranted theories.
Koyré, Alexandre. Galilean Studies. Translated by John Mepham. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1978.
A classic. Treats Galileo’s Platonic conceptual framework as fundamental to his research program, countering the then-dominant
empiricist view that modern science originated when people cast aside philosophical theses and simply engaged in careful
experimental observation. Also reveals the conceptual changes already occurring in the medieval period. Original title: Études
Galiléenes (Paris: Hermann, 1939).
The Received View in Philosophy of Science
Giere and Richardson 1996; Parrini, et al. 2003; and Reisch 2005 are representative of the excellent historical work that has revealed
the diversity within the logical empiricist movement, such as differences between Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, and Rudolf Carnap and
more generally the differences between the right and left wings of the movement. These historical investigations have debunked
several long-standing myths about logical empiricism as a monolithic movement, and they have explored how the various members of
the movement applied its doctrines to the different sciences and how they adapted their positions to their own changing social contexts.
Reisch 2005 is a fascinating study about how the forced immigration of the logical empiricists to America and elsewhere changed the
face of the movement and therefore that of philosophy of science itself, given that the Vienna and Berlin circles constituted the best-
organized form of professional philosophy of science. Carl Hempel, a student of Hans Reichenbach in the Berlin Circle, is best known
for stressing the importance of explanation in scientific research. Hempel 1965 collects his most important papers and makes a major
new contribution to his account of explanation. Although Ernest Nagel was not a member of the Vienna or Berlin circles, Nagel 1961 is
a comprehensive, standard text that systematizes the received view c. 1960. Like Hempel, Nagel placed more emphasis on scientific
explanation than had the Vienna positivists, and he extended his broadly Hempelian account to intertheoretic reduction as the
explanation of one theory by another. This articulation of the view that the development of science is continuous, that new theories
incorporate previous ones as special cases rather than displacing them as incompatible, soon came under attack from Paul
Feyerabend and Thomas S. Kuhn as the locus of their claims about incommensurable breaks, discontinuities, and thus disunities in the
history of science. Popper 1959 and Popper 1962 represent the other most important strand of the received view. Although Karl R.
Popper differed from the logical empiricists in important ways and was perhaps somewhat more historically oriented than they were, he
still conceived philosophy of science as the logic of science. Popper rejected inductive logic and defended a deductive theory of science
though one that was strongly fallibilist and, in its ideal form, modeled on the critical, open society. Hacohen 2000 is the definitive
treatment of Popper’s early development. See also Suppe 1977 and Moulines 2008 (both cited under General Overviews).
Giere, Ronald, and Alan Richardson, eds. Origins of Logical Empiricism. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 16.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
A rich collection with essays by Peter Galison, Michael Friedman, Nancy Cartwright and Jordi Cat, Thomas Uebel, Don Howard, T. A.
Ryckman, Warren Goldfinch, Thomas Ricketts, Richard Creath, Thomas Oberdan, Joia Lewis Turner, Alan Richardson, and Ronald
Giere. From a conference at the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science founded by the Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl.
Hacohen, Malachi Haim. Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902–1945; Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
An absorbing study of Popper’s early development that attempts to rescue his socialist youth and the sociopolitical context of his early
works, including Logic der Forschung, (Vienna: J. Springer, 1934) from his postwar reputation as an anticommunist conservative.
Based on extensive archival research.
Hempel, Carl. Aspects of Scientific Explanation. New York: Free Press, 1965.
A collection of old and new papers providing a major position statement by one of the last and most liberal members of the Berlin or
Vienna circles. Hempel trenchantly critiques operationism and the cognitive significance program, concluding that concept formation
cannot be fruitfully carried out independently of theory formation.
Nagel, Ernest. The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Explanation. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961.
A classic statement of the received view: logical empiricism with a touch of American pragmatism. Nagel also applied his account of
explanation to theory reduction, resulting in a standard account of the continuity of scientific development, an account heavily criticized
in Feyerabend 1981 (cited under Meaning Change and Incommensurability) and Kuhn 1970c (cited under Kuhn on Scientific
Revolutions).
Parrini, Paolo, Wesley Salmon, and Merrilee Salmon, eds. Logical Empiricism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003.
A stimulating collection of papers on various aspects of the development of logical empiricism, with papers by Michael Friedman,
Gottfried Gabriel, Roberta Lanfredini, S. Awodey and A. W. Carus, Thomas Uebel, George Reisch, Gereon Wolters, David G. Stern, T.
A. Ryckman, Michael Stöltzner, Michael Heidelberger, Jaegwon Kim, Maria Carla Galavotti, Martin Carrier, Gürol Irzik, Paolo Parrini,
and Wesley Salmon, a former student of Reichenbach.
https://www-oxfordbibliographies-com.proxy.library.georgetown.edu/view/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0048.xml?rskey=QrP4x8&re… 10/31
Popper, Karl R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson, 1959.

A philosophy of science classic in which Popper develops his influential views concerning discovery, corroboration versus justification,
induction, falsifiability, and fallibilism. He explains and defends his view that science proceeds by a self-correcting process of
conjectures and refutations. An expanded English translation of Popper’s Logik der Forschung (Vienna: J. Springer, 1934).
Popper, Karl R. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Basic Books, 1962.
A collection of Popper’s essays that develop the themes of Popper 1959: science as an open society based on critical rationalism.
Popper advocates a model of science as “revolution in perpetuity.” Kuhn dismissed this view as both incoherent in itself and potentially
destructive to science as we know it (see Kuhn 1970c, cited under Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions).
Reisch, George A. How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
An excellent historical study of how the change in sociopolitical context altered logical empiricism for those logical empiricists who
emigrated to the United States and the resulting changes in philosophy of science itself. Nicely brings out the mutual sympathies and
tensions between logical empiricism and John Dewey’s pragmatism.
Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions
For Thomas S. Kuhn, rapid progress is not a sufficient condition for revolution. Nor is it enough that one big theory displaces another.
Rather, a genuine revolution is one in which the underlying conditions of intelligibility of that science are displaced. That is why Kuhn so
closely linked his concepts of revolution and incommensurability. The Copernican Revolution (Kuhn 1957) was Kuhn’s first book, one
that engaged the topic of scientific revolution. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970c; originally 1962, expanded second
edition 1970) became probably the most-cited philosophical work in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Kuhn claimed that everyone
before him had utterly failed to understand the nature of mature scientific research. What is shocking about Kuhn’s account of scientific
revolutions is that such conceptual transformations allegedly occur even (or especially) in the most mature sciences (e.g., relativity
theory and quantum theory in 20th-century physics) and not only when a new science comes into being with a founding theory or
method. This was a relatively new use of the term “scientific revolution” to label a phenomenon that Kuhn believed had been invisible to
analysts before him. (The main precedent was Gaston Bachelard’s conception of disruptive breaks: see Bachelard 1986, cited under
Continental European Approaches.) Interestingly, the Copernican revolution, usually considered the first step in founding modern
science, was itself a later revolution in Kuhn’s account, since astronomy had progressed under the Ptolemaic mathematical paradigm
for centuries before Nicolaus Copernicus. Thus for Kuhn, Copernicus’s work was more a conceptual reorganization than the founding of
a new empirical science. Kuhnian revolutions, if they exist, are intellectually more violent or disruptive than the logical empiricists and
Popperians realized when they spoke, for example, of quantum theory as “revolutionary.” Kuhn 1970a and Kuhn 1970b reflect Kuhn’s
early engagement with Karl R. Popper and Imre Lakatos and their followers as well as with other major critics, such as Stephen
Toulmin. Contrary to the Enlightenment conception of science, where empirical facts speak for themselves and determine the direction
of science, Kuhn insisted that science involves deep interpretation at all levels—interpretations that are always subject to future
conceptual reorganization. Yet despite his attack on the received view, Kuhn himself ended up with an Enlightenment conception in the
sense that he retained the view that the natural sciences are especially progressive among human activities. The drama of
revolutionary overthrow and radical communication failure is largely missing from Kuhn 1978. Kuhn 1977 collects several early essays
essential to understanding Kuhn’s development. Kuhn 1982–1983 is recognized as a turning point in his conception of
incommensurability and communication, while Kuhn 2000 provides the best early 21st-century representation of his late and unfinished
work.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957.
This was Kuhn’s first book. The Copernican achievement and Galileo’s work on terrestrial motion became something of a model for the
far more radical account of revolutions in Kuhn’s second book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970c).
Kuhn, Thomas S. “Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?” In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by Imre
Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, 1–23. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970a.
Kuhn directly confronts Popper’s account of scientific change, claiming that normal scientists do not engage in Popperian conjecture
and refutation nor is revolutionary science Popperian; that Popper’s “revolution in perpetuity” makes no sense unless Popper’s sense of
revolution is untenably thin; and that Popper’s talk of scientists learning from their “mistakes” is Whiggish.
Kuhn, Thomas S. “Reflections on My Critics.” In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan
Musgrave, 231–278. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970b.
Kuhn’s first major defense of his position in print against the criticisms arising out of the London conference of 1965 and published
reviews.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970c.
The single most influential work on scientific revolutions—a lightning rod for criticism but also an inspiration for later developments.
Contains Kuhn’s account of normal and revolutionary science, paradigms, incommensurability, cognition as direct modeling on
exemplars, and nonrealist scientific progress. (The second and third editions contain the crucial “Postscript—1969.”)
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1977.
A collection of Kuhn’s “historiographical” and “metahistorical” essays, including “Second Thoughts on Paradigms,” “A Function for
Thought Experiments,” “The Essential Tension,” and his attack on Popper in “Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research.”
Kuhn, Thomas S. Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.
A history of the early quantum theory contending that Albert Einstein, not Max Planck, was the revolutionary, founding figure. Critics
complain that Kuhn’s model of normal science interrupted by scientific revolutions is not to be found in this book, suggesting an
inconsistency between his philosophy of science and his historical work.
Kuhn, Thomas S. “Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability.” In PSA 1982: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of
the Philosophy of Science Association. Vol. 2. Edited by Peter Asquith and Thomas Nickles, 669–688. East Lansing, MI:
Philosophy of Science Association, 1982–1983.
Kuhn’s contribution to a symposium on scientific change with Mary Hesse and Philip Kitcher. Kuhn here for the first time clearly
abandons the positivist thesis that interpretation and communication require fairly exact translation into one’s own preferred language.
A collection of Kuhn’s essays, some from his later period, including the title essay, “What Are Scientific Revolutions?,” “Rationality and
Theory Choice,” “Reflections on My Critics” (from 1970), and the long, informative interview with Aristides Baltas, Kostas Gavroglu, and
Vasso Kindi (Baltas, et al. 2000, cited under General Accounts and Applications of Kuhn’s Model).
General Accounts and Applications of Kuhn’s Model
The works listed here are among the more valuable secondary works. The two best general treatments are Hoyningen-Huene 1993 and
Bird 2000. Thomas S. Kuhn generally distrusted applications of his work. He strongly expressed his dislike of the new sociology of
science, then in its early and most radical phase, and he deplored the use of “paradigm shift” and the like beyond the mature sciences
to describe changes in other disciplines and in business and politics. Nonetheless, Barnes 1982 is an influential attempt to show how
Kuhn’s work opens up new possibilities for sociology of science. (See also Barry Barnes’s more recent contribution to Nickles 2003,
cited under Anthologies.) Although Kuhn wished to foment an epistemological revolution, he never wished to start the Science Wars.
Thus insofar as Kuhn can be regarded as a revolutionary himself (for contrary views see Bird 2000 as well as Fuller 2000 and Gattei
2008, the last two cited under Later Philosophical Responses to Kuhn), he fits an old pattern: not even its leaders can control a
revolution. In fact, Kuhn complained to the end of his life that nearly everyone had misunderstood him, friends and foes alike (Harold
Brown being an exception; see Brown 1979). Sharrock and Read 2002 is an attempt to give us the real Kuhn, but of course Kuhn
himself was no longer around to endorse or reject this interpretation. Baltas, et al. 2000 is an exceedingly interesting and detailed
interview with Kuhn by three Greek philosophers of science.
Baltas, Aristides, Kostas Gavroglu, and Vasso Kindi. “A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn.” In The Road since Structure:
Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993. Edited by James Conant and John Haugeland, 253–324. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000.
A long, probing interview near the end of his life in which Kuhn reflects revealingly on his career trajectory and its import. Contains the
admission that he initially “messed up” the concept of paradigm.
Barnes, Barry. T. S. Kuhn and Social Science. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Interesting, largely appreciative view of Kuhn’s treatment of science as a sociocultural activity that opens the way to a new sociology of
science, one that can deal with the technical content of science. Critics complain that Barnes’s strong conventionalism is incompatible
with Kuhn (see Bird 2000).
Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
One of the best books on Kuhn. Bird portrays the Kuhn of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970c, cited under Kuhn on
Scientific Revolutions) as a historian of science doing important but amateur philosophy and still significantly committed to the
Cartesian and empiricist traditions he thought he was rejecting, perhaps the last of the logical empiricists as much as a postpositivist.
Brown, Harold. Perception, Theory, and Commitment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
The first work that Kuhn thought captured what he was trying to say, a book that stood apart from the waves of criticism that The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970c, cited under Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions) was then receiving. Originally published in
1977.
Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science. Chicago:
Still the most thoroughgoing treatment of all aspects of Kuhn’s book, written in close discussion with Kuhn himself and published with
Kuhn’s imprimatur.
Sharrock, Wes, and Rupert Read. Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002.
Considers Kuhn the most influential philosopher since Ludwig Wittgenstein, therapeutically ridding us of misunderstandings about
science and cognition and himself misunderstood. Contains much valuable exposition and a detailed treatment of incommensurability
from a broadly Wittgensteinean viewpoint.
Wray, K. Brad. Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Provides a general account of Kuhn, early and late, as a pathbreaking social epistemologist, defending him against the criticism that his
position is relativist and social constructionist. Gives special attention to the Copernican revolution and the plate tectonic revolution in
geology.
First Responses to Kuhn
Thomas S. Kuhn believed that he was both writing about scientific revolutions and fomenting a beneficial, reforming revolution of his
own in the philosophical understanding of science and in cognitive theory more generally. He was therefore shocked by the wave of
vehement criticism that portrayed him as an enemy of modern science, as undermining its authority by reducing it to the subjective and
relativist level of political and religious contention. Karl R. Popper, in his essay in Lakatos and Musgrave 1970 and in Popper 1975,
attacked Kuhnian normal science as too dogmatic and uncritical, whereas Lakatos 1970 claims that Kuhn reduced scientific decisions
in a revolutionary context to “mob psychology.” Yet Lakatos 1970, a long essay, provided Imre Lakatos the opportunity to articulate his
own “methodology of scientific research programmes” and thus to emerge from Popper’s shadow as a major combatant in his own right
in what is sometimes called the “battle of the big systems.” Another acute critic was Dudley Shapere, whose attacks are reprinted in
Shapere 1984 along with his own account of meaning and scientific change. Scheffler 1967 is a well-known early salvo against Kuhn,
Paul Feyerabend, and Norwood Russell Hanson. It remains valuable as a course text, given its sharp presentation of the issues from
the received point of view. Laudan 1978 marks the entry of another major figure into the battle of the big systems. Stove 1982
articulates the worries about the whole direction of the new philosophy of science from Popper on. This was the heyday of history and
philosophy of science and hence of historical philosophy of science, during which philosophical models of scientific development (the
big systems) were tested against the history of science—a first step toward naturalizing philosophy of science. Stephen Toulmin, among
others, claimed that Kuhn’s own, historically informed model failed the test (as do the editors and some other authors in Donovan, et al.
1988, cited under Anthologies). Toulmin 1972 represents the author’s entry into the battle of the big systems, his previous work on
“ideals of natural order” that are not subject to immediate refutation having anticipated Kuhn on paradigms and normal science. There
was also criticism of Kuhn from historians of science (not represented in this section), as academic history of science was already
moving away from Kuhn’s own sort of internalist history during this period. In addition, historians are generally skeptical of claimed large
breaks in history. They often see it as their professional responsibility to be continuity theorists, to want to fill in the gaps, to find near-
antecedents or precursors.
Lakatos, Imre. “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes.” In Criticism and the Growth of
Knowledge. Edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, 91–195. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
A monograph-length statement of Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programs, a kind of compromise between Popper and
Kuhn. Signals Lakatos’s clear separation from Popper’s model of isolated conjectures and attempted refutations. Develops refined
senses of falsification, ad hocness, heuristics, progress, and so forth relative to long-term research programs.
Lakatos, Imre, and Alan Musgrave, eds. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1970.
A major source containing Kuhn 1970a and Kuhn 1970b (cited under Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions); papers mostly critical of Kuhn by
J. W. M. Watkins, Toulmin, L. Pearce Williams, Popper, Margaret Masterman, and Feyerabend; plus Kuhn’s extensive “Reflections on
My Critics.”
Laudan, Larry. Progress and Its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1978.
Laudan’s early contribution to the battle of the big systems. Distinguishes conceptual from empirical problems and context of pursuit
from that of original discovery and justification. Presents a nonrealist, pragmatic, problem-solving model of scientific progress. Defines
rationality in terms of progress rather than vice versa. Chapter 4 is titled “Progress and Revolution.”
Popper, Karl R. “The Rationality of Scientific Revolutions.” In Problems of Scientific Revolution: Progress and Obstacles to
Progress in the Sciences; The Herbert Spencer Lectures 1973. Edited by Rom Harré, 72–101. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.
Focuses on the idea of scientific progress and on ideological obstacles to progress. Real progress is “revolution in perpetuity,” in which
successor theories contradict their predecessors. Yet Popper also adopts an evolutionary model of scientific change, moving away from
a purely logical account.
Popper, Karl R. The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality. Edited by Mark Notturno. London:
Routledge, 1995.
A selection of Popper’s essays, including “The Rationality of Scientific Revolutions.” The title essay criticizes relativists who say that a
common language and agreement on fundamentals is necessary for fruitful, rational dialogue. On the contrary, replies Popper, we can
learn more from initial disagreement, mutual criticism, and reformulation.
Scheffler, Israel. Science and Subjectivity. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967.

The first book-length critical attack on the alleged subjectivism, irrationalism, and relativism of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Hanson, and Michael
Polanyi. States several paradoxes that allegedly undermine objectivity and claims to resolve “the standard view” of logical empiricism.
Shapere, Dudley. Reason and the Search for Knowledge: Investigations in the Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht, The
Netherlands: Reidel, 1984.
Shapere’s definitive statement of his position. Contains influential critiques of Kuhn (“The Paradigm Concept” and “Meaning and
Scientific Change”) and sets out his positive position in such essays as “The Character of Scientific Change,” “Scientific Theories and
Their Domains,” and “Reason, Reference, and the Quest for Knowledge.”
Stove, David. Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists. Oxford: Pergamon, 1982.
A spirited attack on the overall direction of philosophy of science. Stove’s four irrationalists are Popper, Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and
Feyerabend, all of whom (allegedly) deny that there has been a significant accumulation of scientific knowledge in the past four
hundred years.
Toulmin, Stephen. Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972.
Develops an early evolutionary account of scientific development as opposed to Kuhn’s revolutionary view. For Toulmin, Kuhn created
the very problem for which his model proposes a solution by making his account of normal science so rigid that only a revolutionary
breakout could significantly alter it.
Later Philosophical Responses to Kuhn
Although some writers continued to deplore or ignore Thomas S. Kuhn’s position, others drew insights from his work. (Unlike Karl R.
Popper, Imre Lakatos, and the logical empiricists, Kuhn had no genuine disciples.) Steven Fuller is a major critic who seeks to deflate
Kuhn’s reputation as an original, radical thinker. Unlike works by many other critics, Fuller 2000, based on archival research and
interviews with Kuhn, argues that Kuhn did not attempt to undermine science. On the contrary, Fuller argues, his work smoothly fits into
the scientific recruitment efforts of the Cold War and the conservative idea of a closed, scientific priesthood. The danger is to society,
not to science. Fuller much prefers Popper’s “open society” conception of the relation of science to society. Gattei 2008 is also based
heavily on archival materials, some only recently available, giving us something of an insider’s view of Kuhn in relation to Popper and
the positivists. Stefano Gattei too sides with Popper. Giere 1988 is an influential example of a positive development of central Kuhnian
themes, although Ronald Giere also levels some criticisms. Laudan 1995 contains some of the most insightful analyses of the positivist
legacies to postmodernism with proposals for freeing ourselves from them. Nickles 2006 develops an important theme in Kuhn that
Larry Laudan labeled “pursuit.” Kuhn not only blurred Hans Reichenbach’s distinction between context of discovery and context of
justification (e.g., by contending that very little in real science corresponds to what the philosophers call “confirmation theory”) but also
contended that previous philosophers had missed an entire dimension of appraisal crucial to decision making, especially during crisis
periods, namely the forward-looking appraisal of future potential with its opportunities for interesting new work. In such contexts, future
prospects can carry greater weight than a theory’s or a paradigm’s empirical track record. This idea, which Kuhn did not develop in
detail, is crucial to his claim that he was outlining a new conception of scientific rationality. Weinberg 1998 represents the take on
Kuhn’s work of one of the most eminent and widely read physical scientists.
Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Attacks Kuhn as a conservative, someone unwittingly in the service of the US military-industrial complex, who advocated a closed
priesthood of scientists against Popper’s vision of the open society. While the debate between the Popperians and Kuhn is substantive,
many reviewers complain that Cold War–related charges are unfair to Kuhn.
Gattei, Stefano. Thomas Kuhn’s “Linguistic Turn” and the Legacy of Logical Empiricism: Incommensurability, Rationality, and
the Search for Truth. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.
Defends Popper’s view of science as a continuation of the Enlightenment against Kuhn’s post-Enlightenment or postmodern position.
Argues that Popper’s view that scientific rationality and democratic government are identical wins out over Kuhn’s normal versus
revolutionary science. Agrees with early critiques, such as Scheffler 1967 and Shapere 1984 (both cited under First Responses to
Kuhn). Italian version: La rivoluzione incompiuta di Thomas Kuhn: La tesi dell’incommensurabilità (Turin, Italy: UTET, 2007).
Giere, Ronald. Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Like Kuhn, Giere brings philosophy of science closer to scientific practice, science teaching, and understanding the form of textbooks
and to the view that research proceeds by direct, informal modeling. Promotes the Kuhnian idea that scientists think in terms of
idealized theoretical models, such as the simple harmonic oscillator.
Laudan, Larry. Beyond Positivism and Relativism: Theory, Method, and Evidence. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995.
Collects Laudan’s most trenchant papers critical of both logical empiricism and Kuhn-like positions and reveals the links between them.
As the word “Beyond” indicates, the book also includes Laudan’s proposed solutions to the classical predicaments.
Nickles, Thomas. “Heuristic Appraisal: Context of Discovery or Justification?” In Revisiting Discovery and Justification:
Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on the Context Distinction. Edited by Jutta Schickore and Friedrich Steinle, 159–
182. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2006.
Kuhn often took the forward-looking perspective of scientists, arguing that judgment of future potential can trump empirical track record
in scientific decision making, such as in the choice of a new theory, a phenomenon that challenges traditional confirmation theory.
Nickles agrees and presents an agenda for future work on “heuristic appraisal.”
Weinberg, Steven. “The Revolution That Didn’t Happen.” New York Review of Books, 8 October 1998, 48–52.
Weinberg deplores Kuhn’s postmodernism and argues that Kuhn got it backwards. Instead of mature science ramifying like Darwinian
species without any final goal, the various approaches (to physical science, say) gradually come together into one big, unitary view in
line with Weinberg 1992 (cited under Scientific Realism).
Meaning Change and Incommensurability
For Thomas S. Kuhn, incommensurability is the hallmark of a revolution. His original high standard for the commensurability necessary
for normal research was multidimensional: full mutual translatability of the languages of competing theories, same standards of
evaluation, same goals, and so forth. (He eventually dropped translation as necessary for communication.) Technical content, aims,
methods, and standards or values are all tightly coupled in Kuhn’s view, so ruptures tend to be all-or-nothing affairs. His most radical
claim was that scientists on opposite sides of a paradigm “live in different worlds” (Kuhn 1970c, pp. 116–117; cited under Kuhn on
Scientific Revolutions). A serious objection is that if there is no common measure between Kuhnian paradigms, they cannot be logically
incompatible or compete in a rational manner. The trouble started when Norwood Russell Hanson, Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend denied
that there exists a theory-neutral observation language but retained the positivist doctrine that a theoretical term is implicitly defined by
its relations to other theoretical terms, for a change anywhere in such a relational system implies a change everywhere. Feyerabend
and Kuhn both introduced talk of incommensurability in the early 1960s, and Feyerabend’s key papers are collected in Feyerabend
1981. Chapters 6 and 7 of Hoyningen-Huene and Sankey 2001 are the standard exposition of Kuhn’s view. Khalidi 2000 and Shapere
1998 are good entry points into the debate. Kitcher 1993 presents Philip Kitcher’s influential position. Sankey 1993 helped reignite
interest in Kuhn’s conceptions of incommensurability. Galison 1997 points to the existence in real sciences of “pidgin languages” in
“trading zones” whereby scientists and technicians working across disciplinary boundaries develop intermediate working languages
rather than either achieving or needing full translation into their own technical languages. In raising the problem of unconceived and
inconceivable alternatives, Stanford 2006 connects incommensurability with the underdetermination problem. Kuhn held that actual
theories separated by a revolution are incommensurable. P. Kyle Stanford’s point about alternative theories that are inconceivable at a
given time (as beyond the horizon of intelligibility at that time) implies that any actual theory is possibly incommensurable with currently
inconceivable potential theories of equal or greater merit, including theories that will be actually formulated at some future time. Hacking
2002 (cited under Continental European Approaches) makes several insightful points about conceivability, translation, frameworks, and
Kuhn’s position in relation to those of Feyerabend and Michel Foucault. Soler, et al. 2008 is a conference volume that contains several
contributions to the incommensurability discussion. See also Paul Hoyningen-Huene’s bibliography on incommensurability, Literaturliste
zum Thema Incommensurabilität (cited under Bibliographies).
Feyerabend, Paul. Realism, Rationalism, and Scientific Method. Philosophical Papers 1. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
A large collection of Feyerabend’s papers, several of which employ the term “incommensurable.” Feyerabend and Kuhn both began
speaking of incommensurable theories at about the same time without meaning quite the same thing. See also Volume 2, Problems of
Empiricism.
Galison, Peter. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Most relevant are the chapters on Monte Carlo simulation and trading zones, where Galison develops a conception of mutual
interpretation in terms of “pidgin languages” among expert specialists in “trading zones.” He rejects both the insulated,
incommensurable frameworks view and the smooth continuity view of scientific specialties.
Hoyningen-Huene, Paul, and Howard Sankey, eds. Incommensurability and Related Matters. Dordrecht, The Netherlands:
Kluwer Academic, 2001.
Proceedings of a major conference on incommensurability with articles by several contributors: Richard N. Boyd, Martin Carrier, Fred
Kroon and Robert Nola, Harold I. Brown, Michael Devitt, Gerald Doppelt, Dudley Shapere, Harvey Siegel, Hugh Lacey, Peter Barker,
and Nancy J. Nersessian. The articles relate incommensurability to meaning and reference, realism, rationality and relativism,
multiculturalism, education, and cognition and scientific change.
Khalidi, Muhammad Ali. “Incommensurability.” In A Companion to the Philosophy of Science. Edited by William Newton-
Smith, 172–180. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
An excellent short article summarizing the various problems and attempted solutions.
Kitcher, Philip. The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions. New York: Oxford
Kitcher departs from both the Fregean sense-reference distinction emphasized by Scheffler 1967 (cited under First Responses to Kuhn)
and others and from the causal theory of reference of Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke while retaining elements of both. He argues that
his approach allows for deep conceptual change while avoiding Kuhnian discontinuity.
Sankey, Howard. “Kuhn’s Changing Concept of Incommensurability.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44.4
(1993): 759–774.
Sankey has published more on incommensurability than anyone. Here he argues that Kuhn’s conception of incommensurability falls
roughly into three periods in which his original conception is transformed almost beyond recognition by his late interest in taxonomies
and in translation failure among core sets of theoretical terms.
Shapere, Dudley. “Incommensurability.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward Craig. London:
Routledge, 1998.
A brief summary of developments by a major figure in the early meaning change debate. Shapere 1984 (cited under First Responses to
Kuhn) contends that attention to the history of real science is what points the way forward, not a development in analytic philosophy of
language, such as the causal theory of reference.
Soler, Léna, Howard Sankey, and Paul Hoyningen-Huene, eds. Rethinking Scientific Change and Theory Comparison:
Stabilities, Ruptures, Incommensurabilities? Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2008.
Conference volume containing papers on incommensurability by Soler (with comment by Sankey), Alexander Bird (comment by
Hoyningen-Huhne), Aristides Baltas (comment by Oberheim), and Paul Teller (comment by Ronald Giere) and additional papers on
revolutionary breaks by Barberousse, Hartmann, D’Espagnat, Robert Nola, Zwirn, Harré, Martin Carrier, and Thomas Nickles.
Stanford, P. Kyle. Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives. New York: Oxford
Argues that later work is often underconceived, even unconceivable, at earlier historical stages as beyond the horizon of intelligibility,
thus deepening the underdetermination problem, the arbitrariness of theory choice, and the likelihood of future revolution. The
existence of unintelligible alternatives implies present incommensurability with possible competitor theories.
The Science Wars
During the 1980s and 1990s the battle of the big systems gave way to (or evolved into) “the science wars,” a battle among disciplinary
approaches (philosophy of science versus the new sociology of science and versus both social constructionism and deconstructionism
more generally) and a still wider cultural and political battle between or among various broadly Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment
factions. As critiques and exposés mounted from radical sociologists of science, feminists, New Left political movements,
postcolonialists, and animal rights and environmental activists, among others, many analysts concluded that modern science and its
cultural legacy was under attack—as if scientific claims and decisions carried no more epistemic authority than those made by literary
critics, politicians, religious authorities, relativists, and irrationalists and where rhetoric replaced objective empirical fact and logic.
Thomas S. Kuhn’s model of science received its share of the blame, although he himself was repulsed by these developments. The
reaction of several important philosophers of science was to retreat to strong forms of scientific realism, often defended at a fairly
abstract level, distant from scientific practices. While the science wars have wound down, at least on the academic front, they remain
hot on the political front. In the United States, for example, the political and religious Right has targeted for attack whole areas of
science, especially evolutionary biology, human embryonic stem cell research, and climate science. Gross, et al. 1996 is a collection in
the wake of the scientists Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s attack on the academic Left, the humanities, and the social sciences (in
Gross and Levitt 1998). Sokal and Bricmont 1999 is another attack on the academic Left by two physicists who are political Leftists
themselves. Holton 1993, with the author speaking both as a physical scientist and as a historical scholar, expresses similar worries.
Koertge 2000 is a varied collection aimed mainly at social constructionist science studies. For balance, Ross 1996 and Parsons 2003
include a strong representation from humanists and social scientists. Zammito 2004 is a scholarly analysis by an intellectual historian
that, like Laudan 1995 (cited under Later Philosophical Responses to Kuhn), places much of the blame for what the author does not like
on the earlier generation of philosophers, going back to Willard Quine and Donald Davidson as well as Kuhn.
Gross, Paul, and Norman Levitt. The Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1998.
An attack on “postmodern” critiques of science from literary theory, culture studies, feminism, social constructionism, and purveyors of
sociocultural relativism more generally, typically liberal, multidisciplinary people who (they claim) rarely possess the expertise to
understand what they are attacking. Kuhn gets part of the blame for the alleged decline of higher education. Originally published in
1994.
Gross, Paul, Norman Levitt, and Martin Lewis, eds. The Flight from Science and Reason. New York: New York Academy of
Sciences, 1996.
A large collection of forty-four articles divided into the categories The Public Image of Science, Reasonable Foundations, The
Foundations of Physics, Health, Environment, Social Theories of Science, History, Society, Politics, Feminisms, Humanities, Religion,
and Education.
Holton, Gerald. Science and Anti-Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
A collection of Holton’s essays dealing with science and society in praise of an Enlightenment conception of science and its role in
society and deploring various perceived antiscience movements.
Koertge, Noretta. A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science. New York: Oxford University Press,
2000.
A large collection critiquing science, technology, and society (STS) approaches with pieces by Alan D. Sokal, Paul A. Boghossian,
Philip Kitcher, Paul R. Gross, Philip A. Sullivan, Michael Ruse, William J. McKinney, Allan Franklin, John Huth, Alan Soble, William R.
Newman, Cassandra L. Pinnick, Margaret Jacob, Koertge, Norman Levitt, and Meera Nanda.
Parsons, Keith, ed. The Science Wars: Debating Scientific Knowledge and Technology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2003.
Includes articles by major players and other commentators, both pro and con: Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Steven Shapin and
Simon Schaffer, Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Sandra Harding, Cassandra L. Pinnick, Ellen R. Klein, Donna Haraway, Matt
Cartmill, Steven Weinberg, Philip E. Johnson, Robert T. Pennock, and Martin Gardner.
Ross, Andrew, ed. Science Wars. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
Includes pieces by Sandra Harding, Steve Fuller, Emily Martin, Hilary Rose, Langdon Winner, Dorothy Nelkin, George Levine, Sharon
Traweek, Sarah Franklin, Ruth Hubbard, Richard Levins, Joel Kovel, Stanley Aronowitz, N. Katherine Hayles, Michael Lynch, Roger
Hart, Richard C. Lewontin, Les Levidow, and Andrew Ross.
Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. New York: Picador,
1999.
A critique of leading intellectuals of the academic Left written in the wake of “Sokal’s hoax,” in which his nonsensical piece,
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (reprinted as an appendix to the book),
passed editorial review and was published by the important literary journal Social Text (Summer 1996).
Zammito, John. A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour. Chicago:
A trenchant critique of Kuhn’s model of science, including incommensurability, and of postpositivist developments more generally, from
Quine to the present. Contains much close textual analysis.
Kuhn’s Later Work
After moving to the Department of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1979, Thomas S. Kuhn’s attention
turned away from history of science and toward linguistic analysis until his death in 1996 as he continued trying to make good on the
promissory notes of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970c, cited under Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions). By the early
1980s he was working his way free of the positivist equation of communicability with translatability, the idea that you understand a
foreign language or unfamiliar technical jargon only to the extent that you can translate it literally into your own “home” language. In his
late work he retreated from a “global” to a “local incommensurability” involving the untranslatability of key groupings of taxonomic terms
within the two theories or paradigms in competition. Some critics have questioned the importance of this work, given that
incommensurability no longer implies incommunicability or therefore the degree of revolutionary rupture claimed in Structure. Others
have found Kuhn’s late concern with taxonomic terms stimulating from a cognitive science point of view. Kuhn 2000 is the best and
practically the only available expression of Kuhn’s unfinished work. Andersen, et al. 2006 finds that work highly insightful for early 21st-
century cognitive theory. The authors explicitly counter the view famously (or notoriously) expressed in Latour and Woolgar 1986 that
cognitive accounts should be subjected to a ten-year moratorium to determine if there is anything that social accounts of science cannot
explain. Meanwhile, Wray 2011 is the best treatment of Kuhn’s social epistemology, an account that takes Kuhn’s late work very
seriously.
Andersen, Hanne, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen. The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Defends and extends a Kuhnian view of cognition based on work in cognitive science by Lawrence W. Barsalou and others. Extensive
discussion of incommensurability using the Copernican revolution and bird taxonomy as examples. Defends a cognitivist approach
against social studies of science.
Opens with a few early essays: “Reflections on My Critics,” “What Are Scientific Revolutions?” and “Commensurability, Comparability,
and Communicability.” The title essay sketches Kuhn’s unfinished book project, a defense of incommensurable breaks in terms of local
incommensurability based on mutually untranslatable taxonomic “lexicons.”
Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. 2d ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
The first of the major laboratory studies by sociologists, in this case nonexperts employing an anthropological methodology, reporting
the day-by-day “social construction” of a fact at the Salk Institute. The new postscript states that sociological accounts take priority over
individual cognitive ones and urges a moratorium on cognitive accounts. Originally published in 1979.
Wray, K. Brad. Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Defends Kuhn as a coherent evolutionary and social epistemologist. Includes much-needed attention to Kuhn’s late project. Compares
Kuhn’s social epistemology with work in social studies of science and argues that philosophers need to give more attention to social
epistemology, including work in (other) science studies fields.
Responses to Kuhn’s Theory of Cognition
The early Thomas S. Kuhn, drawing on Ludwik Fleck, Michael Polanyi, and others, introduced into philosophy of science socially
conditioned cognitive factors in the way scientists identify and solve problems, make decisions, and organize themselves. His efforts
were crude by early 21st-century lights, since the then-dominant Mertonian sociology of science did not tackle the internal, technical
content of science and what some analysts now call the cognitive revolution was just getting under way. While science studies experts
have since stressed the thoroughly social nature of inquiry, philosophers on the whole have tended to remain closer to individual
psychology, some arguing from a methodological individualist standpoint that everything must pass through the bottlenecks that we call
individual human minds. In that respect, philosophers have remained closer to Immanuel Kant than to G. W. F. Hegel, who historicized
and socialized Kant. Speaking from the opposite position, Latour and Woolgar 1986 (cited under Kuhn’s Later Work), proposes a ten-
year moratorium on cognitive explanations of science, so confident were Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar that their sociological
approach could explain everything, that everything allegedly inside the “mind” originates from a social context outside of it. While
Kuhn’s early work was an often-cited stimulus for the new sociology of science, both the early and the late Kuhn fostered further work
on cognition, including the cognitive transformations of young children. Andersen, et al. 2006 draws especially on Kuhn’s later work,
whereas the other citations here depend at least as heavily on his early work. Carey 2009 represents the application to early child
development. Friedman 2001 locates Kuhn in a neo-Kantian tradition that is roughly halfway between Kant and Hegel and, in terms of
transformations in the history of physics, can be read as defending the sort of historicized Kantianism found in Kuhn. The two works by
Howard Margolis (Margolis 1987, Margolis 1993) are intuitive articulations of a Kuhnian account of cognition, explicitly applied to two
types of scientific revolutions in the second work, where Margolis provides a cognitivist response to social studies of science, as does
Andersen, et al. 2006. Nancy Nersessian is a historian and philosopher of science who attempts in Nersessian 2008 to make scientific
innovation intelligible by integrating cognitive science with historical research in what she calls “cognitive history of science.” Some
historians have resisted these developments, being more socially and less cognitively inclined than was Kuhn. Collins 2010 directly
probes the idea of tacit knowledge in relation to expertise, a prominent theme in Kuhn as well as Polanyi, to whom Kuhn expressed a
debt.
Andersen, Hanne, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen. The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Defends a Kuhnian view of cognition based on work in cognitive science by Lawrence W. Barsalou and others. Extensive discussion of
incommensurability using the Copernican revolution and bird taxonomy as leading examples. Defends a cognitivist approach and
critiques social studies of science.
Carey, Susan. The Origin of Concepts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
A rich volume summarizing Carey’s work on early cognitive development in children and building on her previous work on conceptual
change in childhood. The basic idea is that developing children resemble Kuhnian scientists who make conceptual breakthroughs that
produce a new theory or model of their world, one incommensurable with the old one from which it emerged.
Collins, Harry. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
In his account of normal science under a paradigm, Kuhn employs Polanyi’s concepts of tacit knowledge and expertise. Collins, a
leading science studies expert and an expert on expertise, develops both concepts further, in ways closer to Ludwig Wittgenstein than
to Kuhn, who (he claims) separated the conceptual from the practical.
Friedman, Michael. Dynamics of Reason. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2001.
Locates Kuhn within a neo-Kantian tradition that includes Moritz Schlick, Hans Reichenbach, and Rudolf Carnap. Defends a two-tiered
account of scientific change similar to Reichenbach’s historically contingent, relativized yet constitutive a priori, thus retaining a Kuhn-
like distinction between normal and revolutionary science. Chief example is the general relativity revolution.
Margolis, Howard. Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition: A Theory of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Provides a highly intuitive account of cognition involving a broadly Kuhnian sort of pattern recognition based on cycles of recognition
promptings and inhibitings to account for cognitive illusions of the Peter Wason and Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman kinds. Useful
in understanding Kuhn’s “learned similarity relation.”
Margolis, Howard. Paradigms and Barriers: How Habits of Mind Govern Scientific Beliefs. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993.
Extends the account of Margolis 1987 explicitly to revolutions, distinguishing the kind that must overcome barriers from the kind that
must bridge gaps, and then applies it to the cases of Nicolaus Copernicus versus Ptolemy, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier versus phlogiston,
and (in opposition to the Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer treatment of) Robert Boyle versus Thomas Hobbes.
Nersessian, Nancy. Creating Scientific Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
Argues the importance of modeling in concept and theory formation at the creative frontiers of science. Nersessian employs the method
of cognitive historical reconstruction that she largely invented, combining close analysis of historical records with the latest work in
cognitive psychology. Maxwell’s electrodynamics is a central case.
Continental European Approaches
While the Germanic positivist tradition lost its deep connection with the historiography of science after Ernst Mach, the French retained
it, from Auguste Comte, Henri Poincaré, and Pierre Duhem to the present. As for revolutionary breaks, Gaston Bachelard, a French
physicist and historical philosopher of science, spoke of coupures épistémologiques, epistemological ruptures or discontinuities, already
in the 1930s, long before Paul Feyerabend and Thomas S. Kuhn (see Bachelard 1986). This language was retained by his student
Georges Canguilhem in a softened way, since Canguilhem focused on the biological sciences, where the breaks are not as sharp as in
mathematical physics (see Canguilhem 1988). In turn, Canguilhem’s student, the humanist Michel Foucault (in Foucault 1972), also
thought in terms of breaks, but now the units in which the ruptures occurred—epistemes, or discursive formations, the set of cultural
rules that limit the discourse of an epoch—become much larger and even more subterranean than Kuhnian paradigms let alone
Lakatosian research programs. Speaking of units other than theories, Ludwik Fleck wrote of “thought styles” and “thought collectives” in
1935 (see Fleck 1979), and the historian of medieval science Alistair Crombie later published a multivolume work on “styles of scientific
thinking”—both of which influenced later thinkers, such as Ian Hacking. Hacking himself is not of course a Continental European;
Hacking 2002 is cited here owing to his use of Foucault. Fleck also influenced Kuhn, but see Mößner 2011 for important differences
between their positions. Gutting 2001 is the best secondary source on French epistemology and philosophy of science, while Tiles 1984
provides a thorough treatment of Bachelard from a philosophy of science perspective.
Bachelard, Gaston. The New Scientific Spirit. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Boston: Beacon, 1986.
Bachelard held that knowledge of the history of science is necessary to understand scientific reason. For him, as later for Kuhn, the
discontinuities found in revolutions are particularly revealing of the nature of scientific rationality, nor do such ruptures prevent progress
toward truth. English translation of Le nouvel esprit scientifique (Paris: Alcans, 1934).
Canguilhem, Georges. Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.
While Canguilhem retains Bachelard’s ideas of obstacles and ruptures, his view is nuanced. Thus vitalism can be an obstacle in one
part of biology while being simultaneously fruitful in another by resisting crude reductionism. English translation of Idéologie et
rationalité dans l’histoire des sciences de la vie (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1977).
Fleck, Ludwik. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn. Chicago:
A medical doctor and biological researcher, Fleck treated scientific developments as complex social affairs involving diverse thought
styles by “thought collectives,” anticipating later work by Kuhn (whom his work influenced) and by social constructivists. English
translation of Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv
(Basel, Switzerland: Benno Schwabe, 1935).
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.
Foucault’s shifts in discursive formations involve entire cultural orientations and thus concern larger cultural units than even Kuhnian
paradigms. A similarity is that Foucault retains a two-level theory, one the deep-cultural a priori or taken for granted (savoir), the other
the surface knowledge involved in thinking and acting (connaisance). English translation of L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard,
1969).
Gutting, Gary. French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
The best account of French philosophy for Anglophone readers especially as concerns epistemology and philosophy of science.
Hacking, Ian. Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Develops Hacking’s version of contingent and historically relative a prioris, the conditions that make possible certain bodies of claims
about objects to be true or false and to have rational purchase. Formations based on such historical a prioris can be incommensurable
to some degree.
Mößner, Nicola. “Thought Styles and Paradigms: A Comparative Study of Ludwik Fleck and Thomas S. Kuhn.” Studies in
History and Philosophy of Science 42.2 (2011): 362–471.
Argues that the similarities between Fleck and Kuhn noted by others are superficial and misleading. Fleck’s “thought styles” are quite
different from Kuhn’s paradigms.
Tiles, Mary. Bachelard: Science and Objectivity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
A useful study of Bachelard’s rejection of Cartesian epistemology, Euclidean geometry, and Baconian inductive method as a basis for
present-day science. See especially chapters 4 and 5 on conceptual change and scientific revolutions.
Contributions in German
Thomas S. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970c, cited under Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions) and central works by
Karl R. Popper have been translated into all the major European languages as well as Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean,
Turkish, and others. Listed here are selected works in German. Hoyningen-Huene 1989 is the best treatment of scientific revolutions in
German and is also the most thorough exposition of Kuhn’s Structure. Especially good is Paul Hoyningen-Huene’s treatment of the
Kantian aspects of Kuhn’s position, but the account is valuable throughout. Bailer-Jones and Friebe 2009 and Bayertz 1981a are
general presentations of Kuhn’s Structure and the debate surrounding it. (Daniela Bailer-Jones wrote the first two chapters of her book,
and Cord Friebe completed it after her death.) Bayertz 1981b is a collection of reflections by prominent scholars on the historical turn in
philosophy of science and on scientific revolutions. The focus of Quitterer 1996 on the transcendental aspects of Kantian approaches
raises an important question: To what degree is Kuhn’s account of science, early and late, based on an approach that is more
transcendental than historical? History fades from Kuhn’s last work, as he acknowledges in Baltas, et al. 2000 (cited under General
Accounts and Applications of Kuhn’s Model). Stegmüller 1973 is a major work by probably the most creative German philosopher of
science during the 1970s and 1980s. Along with Joseph Sneed, he was the founder of the structuralist approach to philosophy of
science.
Bailer-Jones, Daniela, and Cord Friebe. Thomas Kuhn. Paderborn, Germany: Mentis, 2009.
A general introduction to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970c, cited under Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions), including
Kuhn’s opposition to the positions of traditional empiricists, Popper, and Imre Lakatos. Closes with a brief look at various ensuing
developments: the sociological focus on experimental practice and social construction and the structuralist and Bayesian approaches to
philosophy of science.
Bayertz, Kurt. Wissenschaftstheorie und Paradigmabegriff. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981a.

A general exposition of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970c, cited under Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions) and the
critical response to it.
Bayertz, Kurt, ed. Wissenschaftsgeschichte und wissenschaftliche Revolution. Cologne: Paul-Rugenstein, 1981b.
Contains a section on the history of science and the idea of historical revolution with chapters by Bayertz, Krohn, Wolff, Mittelstraß, and
Bhaskar followed by a section specifically on Kuhn and scientific revolutions with contributions by Kuhn (“Theoriewandel als
Strukturwandel: Bemerkunung über den Sneedschen Formalismus”), Wittich, Ludovico Geymonat, and Laitko.
Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. Die Wissenschaftsphilosophie Thomas S. Kuhns: Rekonstruktion und Grundlagenprobleme.

Braunschweig, Germany: Vieweg, 1989.
An earlier version of Hoyningen-Huene 1993 (cited under General Accounts and Applications of Kuhn’s Model).
Quitterer, Josef. Kant und die These vom Paradigmenwechsel: Eine Gegenüberstellung seiner Transzendentalphilosophie mit
der Wissenschaftstheorie Thomas S. Kuhns. Frankfurt: Lang, 1996.
A thesis on the Kantian aspects of Kuhnian paradigm change. An interesting question is whether Kuhn’s conception of revolutions and
incommensurability becomes more transcendental in his late work, which is surprisingly a priori relative to his early emphasis on
history; yet his early work also imposed a rigid structure on history.
Stegmüller, Wolfgang. Probleme und Resultate der Wissenschaftstheorie und Analytische Philosophie. Vol. 2, Theorie und
Erfahrung. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1973.
Part 2 of Theorie und Erfahrung, titled Theorienstrukturen und Dynamik, influenced Kuhn in midcareer and helped stimulate the thriving
industry of structuralism. Part 2 of Volume 2 was later translated into English as The Structure and Dynamics of Physical Theories (New
York: Springer-Verlag, 1976).
Contributions in French, Italian, and Spanish
Listed here is a sample of significant works in French, Italian, and Spanish on scientific revolutions and related matters. Agazzi 2008
provides a panoramic view compatible with Thomas S. Kuhn’s view in The Copernican Revolution (Kuhn 1957, cited under Kuhn on
Scientific Revolutions) that major revolutions have notable sociocultural consequences. Bitbol 1997, by contrast, focuses on perhaps
the most dramatic of all scientific revolutions, especially as it happened in our most mature science. It is the quantum theory revolution,
Michel Bitbol says, that presents the greatest challenge to several forms of realism as well as to wider cultural norms of objectivity.
González 2004 offers a monograph-length account of revolutions in introducing a conference volume on the subject. Wenceslao J.
González prefers Paul Thagard’s account (in Thagard 1992, cited under General Overviews) to Kuhn’s. Kuhn 2000 makes a variety of
Kuhn materials available in Italian. Geymonat 1983 represents a prominent Marxist voice from science studies analyzing Kuhn and Karl
R. Popper and declaring a pox on both their houses.
Agazzi, Evandro. Le rivoluzioni scientifiche e il mondo moderno. Milan: Fondazione Achille e Giulia Boroli, 2008.
Examines the concept of revolution in general and how intellectual and cultural revolutions from the Greeks on have shaped modern
civilization. The focus is on scientific revolutions, broadly construed, since Galileo and on the promise and the risk they pose for the
future.
Bitbol, Michel. “En quoi consiste la ‘révolution quantique’?” Revue Internationale de Systématique 11 (1997): 215–239.
Reflections on why the quantum revolution is the deepest of all. Disagreement about this (Bitbol says) is itself an indication of its depth.
The revolution opened up a vast, fertile domain not conceivable before, and it not only overturned previous science but also challenged
conceptions of objectivity.
Geymonat, Ludovico. Riflessioni critiche su Kuhn e Popper. Bari, Italy: Dedalo, 1983.
Brings a major historian and philosopher’s Marxist viewpoint into the critical discussion of Popper and Kuhn. The first essay recounts
Geymonat’s anti-idealist trajectory from neopositivism to Popper to a Marxism highly critical of both Popper and Kuhn, particularly the
latter’s alleged denial of the objectivity of scientific results.
González, Wenceslao J. “Las revoluciones científicas y la evolución de Thomas S. Kuhn.” In Análisis de Thomas Kuhn: Las
revoluciones científicas. By Wenceslao J. González, 15–103. Madrid: Trotta, 2004.
The volume also contains essays on incommensurability, reference, truth, and revolutions in science and technology by Kuhn, Peter
Machamer, José Martínez Solano, José Luis Falguera, Andoni Ibarra, James E. McGuire, Pascual Martínez Freire, José Hernández
Yago, and Juana Maria Martínez.
Kuhn, Thomas S. Dogma contro critica. Edited by Stefano Gattei. Milan: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2000.
Contains Italian translations of several of Kuhn’s essays, an introductory essay by Paul Hoyningen-Huhne, two 1961 letters from Paul
Feyerabend to Kuhn provided by Grazia Borrini Feyerabend, a long concluding discussion by Stefano Gattei reconstructing Kuhn’s
philosophy of science and focusing on taxonomic incommensurability, and a detailed critical biography.
Parrochia, Daniel. Les grandes révolutions scientifique du XXe siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997.
Argues that the big, 20th-century revolutions are historically unprecedented in both form and content, that is, they are revolutions of a
different kind. Shows in the tradition of Gaston Bachelard the metaphysical and epistemological implications of the three most
significant revolutions: relativity, quantum theory, and chaos.
Frameworks
In regard to paradigms, Thomas S. Kuhn described himself as “a Kantian with movable categories” (Baltas, et al. 2000, cited under
General Accounts and Applications of Kuhn’s Model), meaning that the possibility of knowledge, including the intelligibility of modern
scientific research, depends on a constitutive system of categories or modes of processing underlying day-to-day research activities, a
set of categories so deeply ingrained as to escape fully explicit awareness let alone criticism and attempted refutation in Karl R.
Popper’s sense. G. W. F. Hegel historicized Immanuel Kant, stating that the categories that organize human experience and thought
are not permanent but changeable and only characterize one or another historical epoch. Kuhn disliked Hegel, so we get his “Kantian
with movable categories.” This means that alternative conceptual schemes or frameworks are possible, a claim that Davidson 1984
famously (or notoriously) rejects on the basis of a transcendental argument that his critics have challenged. Stern 2011 explores this
argument. Popper also rejected frameworks for his own reasons (see Popper 1996). It is simply false (he said) that people who hold
different basic assumptions must fail to communicate and that to artificially hold certain principles immune from criticism (as Imre
Lakatos does and as ideologues do) is a bad thing. Laudan 1984 argues that Kuhnian revolutions do not exist, because there is no
conceptual framework so rigidly linked to goals, standards, and method as Kuhn claimed. Michael Friedman, however, might reply that
Popper and Larry Laudan fail to appreciate the need for a constitutive underpinning of the science of a given period, and Ian Hacking
would agree (see Hacking 2002). Friedman 2001 defends the idea of changeable, constitutive frameworks and demonstrates the
historical continuity of the idea from Kant through the neo-Kantians to logical empiricists and then to Kuhn. Surprisingly, in this deep
respect both Hans Reichenbach and Rudolf Carnap held positions that are somewhat similar to Kuhn’s, for when such a framework
changes, especially when the change is fairly rapid, we get something like a Kuhnian revolution in which the new and the old
practitioners find each other’s work unintelligible to some degree. The constitutive principles of the science have changed, and the
discipline is thereby transformed. This brings up the question of whether “revolutions as framework changes” depend essentially on
timescale. Is there a qualitative, structural difference between slow evolution from framework A to framework B and a rapid,
“revolutionary” change? That is, is there an epistemologically relevant difference between evolution and revolution in this context? Or is
the difference mainly subjective, leaving the psychological shock without time for cognitive accommodation and the social
consequences of rapid change? Of course, such consequences are not merely subjective.
Davidson, Donald. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. By Donald Davidson,
183–198. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984.
An article that in effect attempts to stop the development from Kant to Hegel. Davidson argues on transcendental grounds that the idea
of a conceptual scheme alternative to our own is incoherent and thus the idea of conceptual scheme, being a contrast term, is useless.
Accordingly, Davidson quickly dismisses Kuhn’s approach. Originally published in 1974.
Friedman, Michael. Dynamics of Reason. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2001.
While he does not fully endorse Kuhn’s model of revolutions, Friedman, drawing on the neo-Kantian tradition, agrees that the possibility
of modern science depends on a stable framework that is temporarily a priori but subject to revolutionary change—a historically
relativized a priori.
Hacking, Ian. Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Develops a quasi-Kantian view that constitutive “rules” are necessary for the scientific research of a period to make sense. Such rules
determine whether a body of claims possesses truth values at all, and whether such claims have a place in the space of reasons.
Different conditions of intelligibility tend to be incommensurable.
Laudan, Larry. Science and Value: The Aims of Science and Their Role in Scientific Debate. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984.
Laudan denies Kuhn’s claim that scientific goals, standards of evaluation, methodology, and technical content are so tightly linked in a
single big package that a significant change in any of them requires such a change in all—resulting in revolution. Laudan proposes his
own “reticulated” model of scientific change.
Popper, Karl R. The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality. Edited by Mark A. Notturno. London:
Routledge, 1996.
A collection of Popper’s essays accessible to a wide audience. The title essay expresses his antipathy to two-level accounts of scientific
development in which a deeper level or framework is held relatively immune to criticism.
Stern, Robert. “Transcendental Arguments.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. 2011.
A general discussion of the history, strengths, and weaknesses of transcendental arguments, including Donald Davidson’s use of them.
Do Scientific Revolutions Exist, and Are They a Good Thing?
For Thomas S. Kuhn, possession of a paradigm (disciplinary matrix) as a basis for routine problem solving becomes in effect the
criterion of demarcation of mature science. Kuhn explicitly denied that his account of revolutions applies to the social sciences, which
are more like philosophy in their degree of critical discord than like physics, but many social and behavioral scientists rushed to find a
paradigm that would make their field genuinely scientific. For them, having a paradigm was a good thing. The first wave of philosophical
critics, including Karl R. Popper, had the opposite reaction—that paradigms and paradigm change, in Kuhn’s sense, are very bad
things, for they lead to dogma, revolution, and theory choices that are rationally insupportable. Kuhn himself walked the tightrope,
retaining the old view that scientific revolutions are great leaps forward while denying that they are leaps toward a final truth. Bowler
and Morus 2005 surveys alleged historical revolutions, asking whether they were Kuhnian revolutions. Gardner 1987 contends that
there has been a revolution in the cognitive sciences beginning in the late 1950s. Thagard 1992 inquires whether or not there has been
either a behaviorist or a cognitive revolution. Economics is the most mathematical social science, so it is natural to ask about
revolutions there. After Adam Smith’s founding of classical economics, the most likely candidate for a revolution would be the changes
resulting from John Maynard Keynes’s work, a topic explored in Pasinetti 2007. Many would agree, including Kuhn himself, that there
was a Darwinian (founding) revolution in biology. Jablonka and Lamb 2006 claims that a revolution in evolutionary and developmental
biology (evo-devo) is now underway. Godfrey-Smith 2007 denies that it is a revolution in Kuhn’s sense on the ground that the biological
sciences are not organized tightly enough for such a coordinated shift. Peter Godfrey-Smith agrees that various fields in biology have
made exceptionally rapid progress, but he prefers to speak of a “deluge” of results. An exploration of what might count as a non-
Kuhnian revolution can also be found in works such as Bird 2000 (cited under General Accounts and Applications of Kuhn’s Model) and
various articles in Soler, et al. 2008 (cited under Meaning Change and Incommensurability). Given the widespread view that physics is
mathematically and perhaps methodologically more tightly organized than other disciplines, it is perhaps not surprising that physics
should be more vulnerable to strong revolutions than other fields.
Bowler, Peter, and Iwan Rhys Morus. Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005.
Focusing on major developments—the scientific revolution, the chemical revolution, the conservation of energy, the age of the earth,
continental drift, the Darwinian revolution, genetics, ecology, 20th-century physics, cosmology, and the human sciences—the authors
ask in each case: Was it a (Kuhnian) revolution?
Gardner, Howard. The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
A lively overview of work in several fields of cognitive science since the late 1950s. While the cognitive sciences displaced the
behaviorist paradigm, Gardner does not argue that the revolution was explicitly Kuhnian, mentioning Kuhn only in connection with the
claimed Chomskyan revolution in linguistic theory. First published in 1985.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. “Is It a Revolution?” Biology and Philosophy 22.3 (2007): 429–437.
Challenges Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb’s (and others’) claims that evolutionary biology is now undergoing a Kuhnian revolution on
the ground that biology is not so tightly organized as physics. He prefers to speak of a “deluge” of results rather than revolution.
Jablonka, Eva, and Marion Lamb. Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in
the History of Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Jablonka and Lamb argue that evolutionary and developmental biology and the study of evolution of culture are now experiencing a
multitracked revolution. A stimulating challenge to evolutionary orthodoxy in the name of evo-devo (evolutionary and developmental
biology) and epigenetics, including controversial neo-Lamarckian claims.
Pasinetti, Luigi. Keynes and the Cambridge Keynesians: A “Revolution in Economics” to Be Accomplished. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
A thorough treatment of the so-called Keynesian revolution, why it did not fully succeed, and future consequences.
Thagard, Paul. Conceptual Revolutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
After applying his computer program to several reconstructed historical revolutions to establish their rationality, Thagard asks whether
revolutions have occurred in either behavioral or cognitive psychology (chapter 9). Yes, they did in a sense (he answers), but these are
revolutions in methodological approaches, not in specific theories.
Problems of Empiricism
Karl R. Popper critiqued the empiricism of the logical empiricists by (controversially) attempting to show how to learn from experience
without being an inductivist. Bartley 1964 attempts to extend Popper’s critical rationalism to an account of rationality that is
comprehensive and critical without being self-undermining. Thomas S. Kuhn responded that a certain amount of dogmatism in normal
science, saving basic assumptions from empirical tests, accelerates scientific progress and that rational theory choice is not uniquely
dictated by logic plus empirical data. Paul Feyerabend disagreed with Kuhn’s dogmatism and tried to increase the power of Popperian
falsificationism by advocating the proliferation of competing theories (Feyerabend 1981). Van Fraassen 2002 expresses concerns that
Kuhn did not adequately solve the problem he raised concerning the rationality of radical new theory choice and attempts to formulate a
coherent empiricism in terms of “stances.” Lipton 2004 and Rowbottom 2011b strive to clarify Bas C. van Fraassen’s position and its
relation to Kuhn. “Scientific revolutions offer a powerful argument for voluntarism,” writes Peter Lipton (Lipton 2004, p. 153). Okasha
2011 argues, however, via social choice theory, that the problem may be more serious than Kuhn and the others realize. Rowbottom
2011a explicitly addresses the problem of moving from individual to group rationality.
Bartley, William W., III. “Rationality versus the Theory of Rationality.” In The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy.
Edited by Mario Bunge, 3–31. New York: Free Press, 1964.
An attempt to develop a theory of rationality that is not self-undermining (e.g., by falling into fideism or skepticism). He critiques
“comprehensive rationalism” and “critical rationalism” and defends “comprehensively critical rationalism” as the only coherent position.
Feyerabend, Paul. “Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism.” In Realism, Rationalism, and Scientific Method: Philosophical
Papers. Vol. 1. By Paul Feyerabend, 44–96. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Critiques the logical empiricist models of explanation and theory reduction as inadequate to scientific practice. Introduces Feyerabend’s
concept of incommensurability as the absence of logical relations between theories due to meaning variance. See also “Replies to
Criticism: Comments on Smart, Sellars, and Putnam” (pp. 104–131), which introduces Feyerabend’s thesis of theory proliferation to
strengthen empirical testing.
Lipton, Peter. “Discussion: Epistemic Options.” Philosophical Studies 121.2 (2004): 147–158.
A helpful exploration of what a stance empiricism could be and what scope for voluntarism it could allow. Clarifies the issues
surrounding van Fraassen’s stance on empiricism and his voluntarism in part by relating it to the voluntarism of William James and in
part by considering the rationality of scientific revolutions.
Okasha, Samir. “Theory Choice and Social Choice: Kuhn versus Arrow.” Mind 120.477 (2011): 83–115.
Argues that an analogue to Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem shows, contrary to Kuhn, that there is no rational way to solve
Kuhn’s problem of choice of a new theory or paradigm. Kuhn thought the problem was a plurality of equally defensible paths based on
different value weights together with logical underdetermination.
Rowbottom, Darrell. “Kuhn vs. Popper on Criticism and Dogmatism in Science: A Resolution at the Group Level.” Studies in
History and Philosophy of Science 42.1 (2011a): 117–124.
Argues that both Popper and Kuhn make the mistake of assuming that all scientists should possess the same attitude (critical for
Popper, more dogmatic for Kuhnian normal scientists), whereas a group-level conception of science invites a function for both.
Rowbottom, Darrell. “Stances and Paradigms: A Reflection.” Synthese 178.1 (2011b): 111–119.
A comparison of the similarities and differences of stances (in something like van Fraassen’s sense) with Kuhn’s disciplinary matrices
with special attention to exemplars.
van Fraassen, Bas C. The Empirical Stance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
An attempt to reformulate a coherent empiricism that is not self-undermining and that can account for the rationality of scientific
revolutions. His key concept of stance, perhaps inspired by Kuhn’s disciplinary matrix, departs from the traditional epistemological
concern with belief by including commitments, attitudes, values, and goals.
Scientific Realism
Realism is a large and separate issue in its own right, but it intersects the topic of revolutions both historically and logically. The problem
of logical underdetermination of theory by observation was already the central issue in the Copernican debate, including Galileo’s
conflict with the church. How could one know which of the “world systems” is the true one? And historically, whenever a new
development overthrows a deeply entrenched understanding, it calls into question ways of knowing, the status of knowledge claims,
and the ontological status of what is claimed to exist—including the claims for the triumphant new approach. Thomas S. Kuhn himself
was an irrealist for both these reasons and for one more: he questioned whether the idea of a general theoretical truth about the world
(or some domain of it) let alone a unique truth even makes sense. The items listed here represent a small sample of a large debate.
Chakravartty 2011 and Boyd 2002 provide general surveys of the topic. Laudan 1981 is a standard starting point for those who claim
that the history of science provides ammunition against the claim that our best, mature theories are getting closer to the truth. Stanford
2006 looks to the future as well as the past in raising the problem of unconceived or underconceived alternatives of potentially
revolutionary import. Niiniluoto 1999 and Psillos 1999 are two highly regarded treatments of realism. Worrall 2007 explains and defends
structural realism against Larry Laudan and other critics. Weinberg 1992 is included here as representative of the working realism of a
prominent scientist who believes that we are near “the final theory” (of high energy physics). As Ilkka Niiniluoto emphasizes, the central
constructive problems for realism are to clarify the notions of correspondence to the truth and approximate truth or verisimilitude, which
Karl R. Popper’s realist program failed to do. On the defensive side, the main targets of the early 21st century’s realists (aside from
internal disagreements with other realists) are traditional instrumentalism and (some versions of) pragmatism, the historical arguments
of Laudan and P. Kyle Stanford, Bas C. van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, and the minimalist stance of Arthur Fine, who rejects
both realism and instrumentalism partly on the ground that the debate is so interminable as to no longer illuminate how science works.
Boyd, Richard. “Scientific Realism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. 2002.
An excellent survey of the various forms of scientific realism and the state of the discussion, to which Boyd has been a major
contributor, especially as an early developer of Hilary Putnam’s argument that unless one is a realist the impressive history of scientific
progress is a miracle.
Chakravartty, Anjan. “Scientific Realism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. 2011.
A more recent survey of the realist debate replacing Boyd 2002 in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Laudan, Larry. “A Confutation of Convergent Realism.” Philosophy of Science 48.1 (1981): 19–49.
Provides a battery of arguments against various versions of “convergent epistemic realism,” the position that mature sciences converge
on the truth, that successful theories in mature sciences are approximately true and closer to the truth than their predecessors. Attacks
Hilary Putnam’s “miracle argument” for realism. Provides a “negative historical induction” against present-day realism.
Niiniluoto, Ilkka. Critical Scientific Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Niiniluoto defends his important version of realism, in terms of his formal development of the key concept of verisimilitude, against other
versions of realism, instrumentalism, constructive empiricism, Laudan’s pessimistic induction, and Fine’s minimalism.
Psillos, Stathis. Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth. London: Routledge, 1999.
The most accessible and comprehensive book-length defense of realism available. Commits realists to a nonepistemic concept of truth
against various pragmatist and verificationist approaches, such as Michael Dummett’s. Thoroughly develops and defends “the no
miracle argument” that only realism can explain the success of science and our confidence in its predictions.
Stanford, P. Kyle. Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives. Oxford: Oxford
Argues that later work is often underconceived, even unconceivable, at earlier historical stages as beyond the horizon of intelligibility,
thus deepening the underdetermination problem, the arbitrariness of theory choice, and hence the likelihood of future revolution. The
existence of unintelligible alternatives implies present incommensurability with possible competitor theories.
van Fraassen, Bas C. The Scientific Image. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.

Van Fraassen’s defense of “constructive empiricism” against realist interpretations of science. It is the view that, although realist
interpretations are possible, they are not rationally obligatory nor are they necessary to scientific practice. The view retains a basic
distinction between theory and observation.
Weinberg, Steven. Dreams of a Final Theory. New York: Pantheon, 1992.

A prominent physicist defends a “rough and ready,” strong, moderately reductive realism, arguing that we are close to a final, complete,
foundational physical theory. Laments the loss of funding to the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) as delaying the quest. Attacks
Kuhn, philosophical relativism, and the utility of philosophy to physics generally.
Worrall, John. “Miracles and Models: Why Reports of the Death of Structural Realism May Be Exaggerated.” Royal Institute of
Philosophy 82, suppl. 61 (2007): 125–154.
Defends Worrall’s version of structural realism, the view that we may reasonably hold that our most successful theories are
approximately true in a structural sense, that is, the basic equations are retained, at least in the limit or to an approximation, in the
successor theory even if the physical “content” changes.
Recent Work in Models of Scientific Change
Since the battle of the big systems ended there has been a general, “postmodern” reaction against the totalizing conceptions of general
philosophy of science, so that in the early 21st century the emphasis is on differences among the sciences, not their similarities, on
disunity rather than unity. There is a corresponding reluctance to force all revolutions into the Kuhnian mold. Thomas S. Kuhn himself
refused to apply his model to the physics of World War II and after, as a plethora of specialties emerged and intertwined with one
another and with related technologies. How general a phenomenon Kuhnian revolutions might be depends on the underlying
mechanism and its dynamics. Thus Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge noted that their doctrine of punctuated equilibrium in
evolutionary biology is analogous to Kuhn’s long periods of stasis interrupted by highly creative intervals during which new forms
emerge. Could there be a common dynamic here? Various writers have conjectured that chaos theory (rapid transitions from one
attractor to another) or the theory of self-organizing or complex adaptive systems might be responsible. Kauffman 1993, a modern
classic, represents this approach. In philosophy of science proper, Bayesian models of science remain popular, as do some general
models of explanation, especially the unification model of Kitcher 1993 (cited under Textbooks). As for Bayesianism, Howson and
Urbach 2005 is the standard entry for philosophers, with Mayo 1996 being the best philosophical critique (of an earlier edition of Colin
Howson and Peter Urbach’s book). Henderson, et al. 2010 is interesting for its attempt to solve Kuhn’s problem of revolutionary new
theories from a Bayesian perspective. This is the problem of explaining why reasonable scientists would abandon a highly successful
old theory for an underdeveloped new approach—as has happened time and again. Hull 1988 is an influential attempt to theorize
scientific development as a form of competitive social evolution. Latour 2007 presents Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), the
best-known general model in science studies. Not represented here but worth mentioning is the philosophical work on models and
mechanisms, which is too variegated to summarize easily. Kuhnian revolutions can be viewed as a significant change in preferred
models. Models in a more formal sense, which Kuhn nevertheless believed shared something of his idea of exemplars, can be found in
the semantic view of theories (Bas C. van Fraassen, Frederick Suppe) and in the related structuralist approach (Wolfgang Balzer, C.
Ulises Moulines, and Theo Kuipers).
Henderson, Leah, Noah Goodman, Joshua Tenenbaum, and James Woodward. “The Structure and Dynamics of Scientific
Theories: A Hierarchical Bayesian Perspective.” Philosophy of Science 77.2 (2010): 172–200.
An attempt to employ a multilevel Bayesian approach to solve the problem of new theories in a rational manner: Why would rational
scientists abandon a successful old theory or paradigm to embrace a new and underdeveloped one? It is unclear how this works for
highest-level change.
Howson, Colin, and Peter Urbach. Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach. 3d ed. Chicago: Open Court, 2005.
The best general introduction to the Bayesian approach to probabilistic and statistical reasoning for science studies practitioners.
Accessible and intuitive.
Hull, David. Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science. Chicago:
Rejects Kuhn’s account of normal science and revolution and also relativist accounts from social studies of science in favor of Hull’s
own social-evolutionary model. The tension between the mutual cooperation of scientists and their self-interested competition results in
a robust enterprise overall.
Kauffman, Stuart. The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Something of a (contested) modern classic that has helped stimulate a large literature on self-organization, complex adaptive systems,
and network theory. Kauffman argues that his self-organization and reorganization dynamic is more important to biological evolution
than Darwinian adaptationism, which only applies the local polish to emergent forms.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
The best-known general model of science coming from science studies, ANT includes nonhuman material entities in the networks and
gives them agency with semiotic relations as well as causal relations to other nodes in the network. Feminists have criticized Latour’s
formulation of ANT for its heavy use of military metaphors.
Mayo, Deborah. Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
The best-known general critique of “the Bayesian way,” the subjective Bayesian account of scientific inference. Mayo argues that her
error-statistical account enables us to learn more from our “mistakes” than subjective Bayesian approaches permit.
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Cohen, I. Bernard. Revolution in Science. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1985.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Andersen, Hanne. On Kuhn. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001.

Lange, Marc. Philosophy of Science: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

Cohen, I. Bernard. Revolution in Science. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1985.

Erkenntnis 10.2 (July 1976).

Journal for General Philosophy of Science 42.1 (2011).

History of the Idea

Cohen, I. Bernard. Revolution in Science. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1985.

The Received View in Philosophy of Science

Popper, Karl R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson, 1959.

Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions

General Accounts and Applications of Kuhn’s Model

First Responses to Kuhn

Scheffler, Israel. Science and Subjectivity. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967.

Later Philosophical Responses to Kuhn

Meaning Change and Incommensurability

The Science Wars

Kuhn’s Later Work

Responses to Kuhn’s Theory of Cognition

Continental European Approaches

Bayertz, Kurt. Wissenschaftstheorie und Paradigmabegriff. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981a.

Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. Die Wissenschaftsphilosophie Thomas S. Kuhns: Rekonstruktion und Grundlagenprobleme.

Contributions in French, Italian, and Spanish

Do Scientific Revolutions Exist, and Are They a Good Thing?

van Fraassen, Bas C. The Scientific Image. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.

Weinberg, Steven. Dreams of a Final Theory. New York: Pantheon, 1992.

Recent Work in Models of Scientific Change

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