Table Outline of main body of a scientific-style thesis* 17 Table Use of numbers and numerals in academic writing 29 Table How to avoid using double negatives 32 Table Different usages of the word ‘only’ 32 Table Usage of ‘to comprise’ 32 Table Usage of ‘there’ / ‘their’ / ‘they’re’ 33 Aug 13, · The heart of the incommensurability thesis after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the idea that certain kinds of translation are impossible. Early on Kuhn drew a parallel with Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation (a, ; c, ) A thesis, or dissertation (abbreviated diss.), is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings. In some contexts, the word "thesis" or a cognate is used for part of a bachelor's or master's course, while "dissertation" is normally applied to a doctorate.. This is the typical arrangement in
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn — is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time. His account of the development of science held that science enjoys periods of stable growth punctuated by revisionary revolutions.
He then switched to history of science, and as his career developed he moved over to philosophy of science, scientific master thesis outline, although retaining a strong interest in the history of physics. Inhe graduated from Harvard summa cum laude. Thereafter he spent the remainder of the war years in research related to radar at Harvard and then in Europe. Kuhn was elected to the prestigious Society of Fellows at Harvard, another of whose members was W.
At this time, and untilKuhn taught a class in science for undergraduates in the humanities, as part of the General Education in Science curriculum, developed by James B. Conant, the President of Harvard. His initial bewilderment on reading the scientific work of Aristotle was a formative experience, followed as it was by scientific master thesis outline more or less sudden ability to understand Aristotle properly, undistorted by knowledge of subsequent science.
This led Kuhn to concentrate on history of science and in due course he was appointed to an assistant professorship in general education and the history of science. During this period his work focussed on eighteenth century matter theory and the early history of thermodynamics. Kuhn then turned to the history of astronomy, and in he published his first book, scientific master thesis outline, The Copernican Revolution. In Kuhn became a full professor at the University of California at Berkeley, having moved there in to take up a post in history of science, but in the philosophy department.
This enabled him to develop his interest in the philosophy of science. The functions of a paradigm are to supply puzzles for scientists scientific master thesis outline solve and to provide the tools for their solution. Crisis is followed by a scientific revolution if the existing paradigm is superseded by a rival. This thesis of incommensurability, developed at the same time by Feyerabend, rules out certain kinds of comparison of the two theories and consequently rejects some traditional views of scientific development, such as the view that later science builds on the knowledge contained within earlier theories, or the view that later theories are closer approximations to the truth than earlier theories.
According to Kuhn himself, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions first aroused interest among social scientists, although it did in due course create the interest among philosophers that Kuhn had intended and also before long among a much wider academic and general audience. Since the following of rules of logic, of scientific method, etc. This was highlighted by his rejection of the distinction between discovery and justification denying that we can distinguish between the psychological process of thinking up an idea and the logical process of justifying its claim to truth and his emphasis on incommensurability the claim that certain kinds of comparison between theories are impossible.
The negative response among philosophers was exacerbated by an important naturalistic tendency in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that was then unfamiliar. In Kuhn left Berkeley to take up the position of M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. An International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science was held at Bedford College, London. One of the key scientific master thesis outline of the Colloquium was intended to be a debate between Kuhn and Feyerabend, with Feyerabend promoting the critical rationalism that he shared with Popper.
Papers from these discussants along with contributions from Feyerabend and Lakatos, were published several years later, scientific master thesis outline, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledgeedited by Lakatos and Alan Musgrave the fourth volume of proceedings from this Colloquium. In the same year the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published, including an important postscript in which Kuhn clarified his notion of paradigm.
Kuhn also, for the first time, explicitly gave his work an anti-realist element by denying the coherence of the idea that theories could be scientific master thesis outline as more or less close to the truth.
The following year saw the publication of his second historical monograph Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuityconcerning the early history of quantum mechanics. In he was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Kuhn continued throughout the s and s to work on a variety of topics in both history and philosophy of science, including the development of the concept of incommensurability, and at the time of his death in he was working on a second philosophical monograph dealing with, among other matters, an evolutionary conception of scientific change and concept acquisition in developmental psychology.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn paints a picture of the development of science quite unlike any that had gone before. Indeed, before Kuhn, there was little by way of scientific master thesis outline carefully considered, theoretically explained account of scientific change.
Instead, there was a conception of how science ought to develop that was a by-product of the prevailing philosophy of science, as well as a popular, heroic view of scientific progress. According to such opinions, science develops by the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors.
Such progress might accelerate in the hands of a particularly great scientist, but progress itself is guaranteed by the scientific method. In the s, when Kuhn began his historical studies of science, the history of science was a young academic discipline. Even so, it was becoming clear that scientific change was not always as straightforward as the standard, traditional scientific master thesis outline would have it.
Kuhn was the first and most important author to articulate a developed alternative account. Since the standard view dovetailed with the dominant, positivist-influenced philosophy of science, a non-standard view would have important consequences for the philosophy of science. The revolutionary phases are not merely periods of accelerated progress, but differ qualitatively from normal science.
Normal science does resemble the standard cumulative picture of scientific progress, on the surface at least. While this term suggests that normal science is not dramatic, its main purpose is to convey the idea that like someone doing a crossword puzzle or a chess problem or scientific master thesis outline jigsaw, the puzzle-solver expects to have a reasonable chance of solving the puzzle, that his doing so will depend mainly on his own ability, scientific master thesis outline, and that the puzzle itself and its methods of solution will have a high degree of familiarity.
A puzzle-solver is not entering completely uncharted territory. Because its puzzles and their solutions are familiar and relatively straightforward, normal science can expect to accumulate a growing stock of puzzle-solutions. Not all the achievements of the preceding period of normal science are preserved in a revolution, and indeed a later period of science may find itself without an explanation for a phenomenon that in an earlier period was held to be successfully explained.
If, as in scientific master thesis outline standard picture, scientific revolutions are like normal science but better, then revolutionary science will at all times be regarded as something positive, to be sought, promoted, and welcomed. Kuhn rejected both the traditional and Popperian views in this regard. He claims that normal science can succeed in making progress only if there is a strong commitment by the relevant scientific scientific master thesis outline to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments and techniques, and even metaphysics, scientific master thesis outline.
Because commitment to the disciplinary matrix is a pre-requisite for successful normal science, an inculcation of that commitment is a key element in scientific training and in the formation of the mind-set of a successful scientist. The unusual emphasis on a conservative attitude distinguishes Kuhn not only from the heroic element of the standard picture but also from Popper and his depiction of the scientist forever attempting to refute her most important theories.
This conservative resistance to the attempted refutation of key theories means that revolutions are not sought except under extreme circumstances. Nor do they regard anomalous results as falsifying those theories. It is only speculative puzzle-solutions that can be falsified in a Popperian fashion during normal science b, Rather, anomalies are ignored or explained away if at all possible.
It is only the accumulation of particularly troublesome anomalies that poses a serious problem for the existing disciplinary matrix. A particularly troublesome anomaly is one that undermines the practice of normal science. For example, an anomaly might reveal inadequacies in some commonly used piece of equipment, perhaps by casting doubt on the underlying theory. If much of normal science relies upon this piece of equipment, normal science will find it difficult to continue with confidence until this anomaly is addressed.
The most interesting response to crisis will be the search for a revised disciplinary matrix, scientific master thesis outline, a revision that will allow for the elimination of at least the most pressing anomalies and optimally the solution of many outstanding, unsolved puzzles.
Such a revision will be a scientific revolution. According to Popper the revolutionary overthrow of a theory is one that is logically required by an anomaly. According to Kuhn however, there are no rules for deciding the significance of a puzzle and for weighing puzzles and their solutions against one another. The decision to opt for a revision of a disciplinary matrix is not one that is rationally compelled; nor is the particular choice of revision rationally compelled.
For this reason the revolutionary phase is particularly open to competition among differing ideas and rational disagreement about their relative merits. This suggestion grew in the hands of some sociologists and historians of science into the thesis that the outcome of a scientific revolution, indeed of any step in the development of science, is always determined by socio-political factors, scientific master thesis outline. Kuhn himself repudiated such ideas and his work makes it clear that the factors determining the outcome of a scientific dispute, particularly in modern science, are almost always to be found within science, specifically in connexion with the puzzle-solving power of the competing ideas.
The revolutionary search for a replacement paradigm is driven by the failure of the existing paradigm to solve certain important anomalies. Any replacement paradigm had better solve the majority of those puzzles, or it will not be worth adopting in place of the existing paradigm.
It may however lose some qualitative, explanatory power [b, 20]. Hence we can say that revolutions do bring with them an overall increase in puzzle-solving power, scientific master thesis outline, the number and significance scientific master thesis outline the puzzles and anomalies solved by the revised paradigm exceeding the number and significance of the puzzles-solutions that are no longer available as a result of Kuhn-loss.
Indeed he later denies that any sense can be made of the notion of nearness to the truth a, The evolutionary development of an organism might be seen as its response to a challenge set by its environment. But that does not imply that there is some ideal form of the organism that it is evolving towards. Analogously, scientific master thesis outline, science improves scientific master thesis outline allowing its theories to evolve in response to puzzles and progress is measured by its success in solving those puzzles; it is not measured by its progress towards to an ideal true theory.
While evolution does not lead towards ideal organisms, scientific master thesis outline, it does lead to greater diversity of kinds of organism. As Wray explains, this is the basis of a Kuhnian account of specialization in science, an account that Kuhn was developing particularly in the latter part of his career.
According to this account, the revolutionary new theory that succeeds in replacing another that is subject to crisis, scientific master thesis outline, may fail to satisfy all the needs of those working with the earlier theory. One response to this might be for the field to develop two theories, with domains restricted relative to the original theory one might be the old theory or a version of it. This formation of new specialties will also bring with it new taxonomic structures and so leads to incommensurability.
A mature science, according to Kuhn, experiences alternating phases of normal science and revolutions. In normal science the key theories, instruments, values and metaphysical assumptions that comprise the disciplinary matrix are kept fixed, permitting the cumulative generation of puzzle-solutions, whereas in a scientific revolution the disciplinary matrix undergoes revision, in order to permit the solution of the more serious anomalous puzzles that disturbed the preceding period of normal science.
This is the consensus on exemplary instances of scientific research. Such texts contain not only the key theories and laws, but also—and this is what makes them paradigms—the applications of those theories in the solution of important problems, along with the new experimental or mathematical techniques such as the chemical balance in Traité élémentaire de chimie and the calculus in Principia Mathematica employed in those scientific master thesis outline. The claim that the consensus of a disciplinary matrix is primarily agreement on paradigms-as-exemplars is intended to explain the nature of normal science and the process of crisis, revolution, and renewal of normal science.
It also explains the birth of a mature science, scientific master thesis outline. Competing schools of scientific master thesis outline possess differing procedures, theories, even metaphysical presuppositions. Consequently there is little opportunity for collective progress. Even localized progress by a particular school is made difficult, since much scientific master thesis outline energy is put into arguing over the fundamentals with other schools instead of developing a research tradition.
However, progress is not impossible, and one school may make a breakthrough whereby the shared problems of the competing schools are solved in a particularly impressive fashion.
This success draws away adherents from the other schools, and a widespread consensus is formed around the new puzzle-solutions. This widespread consensus now permits agreement on fundamentals.
For a problem-solution will embody particular theories, procedures and instrumentation, scientific language, metaphysics, and so forth.
Consensus on the puzzle-solution will thus bring consensus scientific master thesis outline these other aspects of a disciplinary matrix also.
The successful puzzle-solution, now a paradigm puzzle-solution, will not solve all problems. Indeed, it will probably raise new puzzles. For example, the theories it employs may involve a constant whose value is not known with precision; the paradigm puzzle-solution may employ approximations that could be improved; it may suggest other puzzles of the same kind; it may suggest new areas for investigation.
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