| Phi 272 Fall 2013 |
|
(Site navigation is not working.) |
Kuhn refers to what look like chapters as “sections” (presumably because this was originally written as a contribution to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science rather than as an independent volume); I’ll follow his practice. An extended postscript was added to the second edition and I’ll be assigning parts of it along with sections of the main text. Although I haven’t assigned it, I encourage you to look at Kuhn’s preface, too.
This and other guides to Kuhn’s book will consist primarily of questions suggesting things to look for in the text. Kuhn often structures his discussion by offering lists. Sometimes (as in the notes to section I below) I’ll direct you to them, but you should be on the lookout for lists elsewhere, too.
Section I
• What are the tasks of historians under the development-by-accumulation model of the history of science and how do they prove difficult to carry out (pp. 1-3)?
• What are the aspects of science (I count 7) that form his outline of the book (pp. 3-8)?
• Kuhn expects objections to the effect that he is drawing conclusions about what science ought to be from a study of what it has been (and it might not have been what it ought to have been)—how does he reply (pp. 8-9)?
Section II
• What is Kuhn’s initial characterization of paradigms (pp. 10-11)? (You might want to also look ahead at what he says about the idea in the second paragraph of the postscript at the top of p. 174 [175].*)
* When pages in the 2nd and 3rd editions differ from the 2012 edition, they are given in brackets.
• What distinguishes the periods preceding and following Newton’s Opticks (pp. 11-15)?
• And more generally, what distinguishes the fact-gathering and the interpretative work of pre-paradigm and post-paradigm science (pp. 15-18)?
• What is the effect of the emergence of a paradigm on the social structure of science and on its literature (pp. 18-22)?