How Does Science Add to Knowledge?: Thomas Kuhn's Paradigms
In studying the way science has been conducted in different eras, Thomas Kuhn detects a striking pattern. Brief periods of revolution are set against a background of longer calmer periods which Kuhn calls "normal science." In a period of normal scie...
How Does Science Add to Knowledge?: Kuhn's Challenge to the Cumulative Progression of Science
Kuhn argues that scientists almost never follow Bacon's suggestion and simply observe nature. Rather, a paradigm influences what they observe and how they interpret it. Kuhn also agrees with Popper that induction does not properly describe how scien...
Kant and the Distinction Between Scheme and Reality
Philosopher Ian Hacking talks about the distinction Immanuel Kant made between reality and scheme, a word used to describe "...the conceptual organization which we either socially or individually bring to raw sensation in order to organize it into s...
Does Science Give Us Truth?: Conflict Between Consensus Theories of Truth and Popper's Scientific Realism
Agreement in a community of scientists can also be taken as a measure of truth, a human-centered concept that Arthur Fine calls "consensus theories of truth." In looking at the shift from Sir Isaac Newton's theory of gravity to Albert Einstein's, Ka...
Does Science Give Us Truth?: Conceptual Relativism
Conceptual relativism in many ways parallels the coherence theory of truth. The idea is that any representation of reality will always be influenced by the information available. There undoubtedly will be opposing points of view that do not reconcil...
Thomas Kuhn
Philosopher Ian Hacking talks about Thomas Kuhn's notion that science is very much a historical process--one in which breakthroughs often come at unexpected or unpredictable times, rather than at regular intervals. He also discusses Kuhn's notion of...
Thomas Kuhn: His Core Ideas
Philosopher Ian Hacking talks about Thomas Kuhn's core ideas, including the notion that scientists generally practice what Kuhn terms "normal science," but that at times there are tremendous breakthroughs that usually come about after a period of fr...
Empiricism and Rationalism
Philosopher Ian Hacking talks about the challenge of making a clear distinction between classic rationalists and empiricists. He notes that "there's an awful lot of theorizing to be found in those empiricists, and a lot of concern with experimentati...
Feyerabend and Kuhn
Philosopher Ian Hacking talks about Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, who were contemporaries at UC Berkeley in the late 1950's. Both were critical of the idea that there is some fixed, rational logic to science. But Feyerabend took the idea of openn...
Science and Myths
Philosopher Stephen Toulmin talks about the tendency to mock past scientists for their ideas. Professor Toulmin argues that "...people are always doing the best they can, from where they stand, with the material that's available." He adds that the c...