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Articles

The Philosophy of Scientific Revolutions

Anastasios Economou describes how Thomas Kuhn changed the way we think about science.

Before the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, the philosophy of science was dominated by a combination of ideas that came to be known as the received view. This was a loose, but nevertheless sophisticated, collection of theories about the methodology, aims and practice of science. The received view could be summarised in the following points:

1) Realism. (a) The ‘realist’ thinks there is an intrinsic reality in the world and even unobserved physical entities not accessible to our unassisted senses (such as electrons or magnetic fields) can, and do, have real existence. (b) A more extreme version of realism maintains that, in addition, there is a unique best description of this real world expressed in a ‘true’ theory.

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