Kuhn's development before and after structure

Paul Hoyningen-Huene

pp. 185-195

in: William J. Devlin, Alisa Bokulich (eds), Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

This chapter deals with Kuhn's development immediately before Structure and during the last two decades of his life. I discuss Kuhn's development from his penultimate draft of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to its final version. Here, I examine the notable absence of Wittgenstein's influence and the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification in the penultimate draft. Next, I turn to his unfinished book manuscript entitled The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development. I explore Kuhn's developing theory of kind terms and how this theory becomes valuable in understanding Kuhn's views of incommensurability, taxonomies, lexicons, revolutionary science, and reality.

Cited authors

Wittgenstein Ludwig

Kuhn Thomas S