Kuhnian Revolution Research Articles

Theory vs. experiment: The rise of the dynamic view of proteins

Over the past century, the scientific conception of the protein has evolved significantly. This paper focuses on the most recent stage of this evolution, namely, the origin of the dynamic view of proteins and the challenge it posed to the static view of classical molecular biology. Philosophers and scientists have offered two hypotheses to explain the origin of the dynamic view and its slow reception by structural biologists. Some have argued that the shift from the static to the dynamic view was a Kuhnian revolution, driven by the accumulation of dynamic anomalies, while others have argued that the shift was caused by new empirical findings made possible by technological advances. I analyze this scientific episode and ultimately reject both of these empiricist accounts. I argue that focusing primarily on technological advances and empirical discoveries overlooks the important role of theory in driving this scientific change. I show how the application of general thermodynamic principles to proteins gave rise to the dynamic view, and a commitment to these principles then led early adopters to seek out the empirical examples of protein dynamics, which would eventually convince their peers. My analysis of this historical case shows that empiricist accounts of modern scientific progress—at least those that aim to explain developments in the molecular life sciences—need to be tempered in order to capture the interplay between theory and experiment.

Feyerabend and Kuhn on Monism and Pluralism

Feyerabend had many interlocutors in his controversial career, and one of them was Kuhn. One key point of contention in their interaction was the divergence between the monism inherent in Kuhnian normal science and Feyerabend’s pluralism about the content and methodology of science and other systems of knowledge. In this paper I offer my perspective on this disagreement. After presenting Feyerabend’s critique of Kuhn, I argue that the disagreement between Kuhn and Feyerabend on this point was not as radical as it may appear. Feyerabend respected the autonomy of diverse cultural and epistemological traditions, and such traditions are often monistic within themselves, in the manner of Kuhnian normal science. On the other hand, Kuhnian revolutions require the presence of competing paradigms at least during periods of extraordinary science. I propose a pluralist position that can accommodate local monism, but ultimately recommends going beyond monism for the purpose of productive interactions between different systems of practice. Such a pluralism can incorporate the advantages of both Feyerabend’s liberal epistemology and Kuhn’s advocacy of disciplined normal science.

A Kuhnian revolution in molecular biology: Most genes in complex organisms express regulatory RNAs.

Thomas Kuhn described the progress of science as comprising occasional paradigm shifts separated by interludes of 'normal science'. The paradigm that has held sway since the inception of molecular biology is that genes (mainly) encode proteins. In parallel, theoreticians posited that mutation is random, inferred that most of the genome in complex organisms is non-functional, and asserted that somatic information is not communicated to the germline. However, many anomalies appeared, particularly in plants and animals: the strange genetic phenomena of paramutation and transvection; introns; repetitive sequences; a complex epigenome; lack of scaling of (protein-coding) genes and increase in 'noncoding' sequences with developmental complexity; genetic loci termed 'enhancers' that control spatiotemporal gene expression patterns during development; and a plethora of 'intergenic', overlapping, antisense and intronic transcripts. These observations suggest that the original conception of genetic information was deficient and that most genes in complex organisms specify regulatory RNAs, some of which convey intergenerational information. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/qxeGwahBANw.

'If it don't fit, don't force it?' If real-world, complex clinical decisions are intrinsically categorical can dimensional systems add value? Reflections on Lahey, Tiemeier & Krueger (2022).

'If it don't fit, don't force it?' If real-world, complex clinical decisions are intrinsically categorical can dimensional systems add value? Reflections on Lahey, Tiemeier & Krueger (2022).

Empirically Incoherent Quantum Gravity

AbstractIt is argued that certain quantum theories of gravity — string theory, loop quantum gravity, non‐commutative field theory — do not include spacetime as part of their fundamental ontology. There is a concern in the literature that theories of this kind are physically opaque and empirically incoherent. In this paper, I clarify and amend Huggett and Wüthrich's argument against these claims. Whereas the content of this paper centres on the disappearance and re‐emergence of spacetime in quantum gravity, much of the philosophical work centres more generally on issues of (emergent) ontology and how this ontology can be extracted from formal theories, the role of formal derivations in justifying ontological relations, the nature of Kuhnian revolutions, and the application of these revolutions to quantum gravity.

Evolutionary theories and the philosophy of science

Philosophical theories proceeding from the history of physical-mathematical sciences are hardly applicable to the analysis of biosciences and evolutionary theory, in particular. This article briefly reconstructs the history of evolutionary theory beginning with its roots in the 19th century and up to the ultracontemporary concepts. Our objective is to outline the dynamics of Darwinism and anti-Darwinism from the perspective of the philosophy of science. We begin with the arguments of E. Mayr against the applicability of T. Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions to the history of biology. Mayr emphasized that Darwin’s publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 caused a genuine scientific revolution in biology, but it was not a Kuhnian revolution. Darwin coined several theories comprising a complex theoretical system. Mayr defined five most crucial of these theories: evolution as such, common descent of all organisms including man, gradualism, the multiplication of species explaining organic diversity, and, finally, the theory of natural selection. Distinguishing these theories is of great significance because their destiny in the history of biology substantially differed. The acceptance of one theory by the majority of the scientific community does not necessarily mean the acceptance of others. Another argument by Mayr proved that Darwin caused two scientific revolutions in biology, which Mayr referred to as the First and Second Darwinian Revolutions. The Second Darwinian Revolution happened already in the 20th century and Mayr himself was its active participant. Both revolutions followed Darwin’s concept of natural selection. The period between these two revolutions can be in no way described as “normal science” in Kuhnian terms. Our reconstruction of the history of evolutionary theory support Mayr’s anti-Kuhnian arguments. Furthermore, we claim that the “evolution of evolutionary theory” can be interpreted in terms of the modified research programmes theory by Imre Lakatos, though not in their “purity”, but rather modified and combined with certain aspects of Marxian-Hegelian dialectics.

Commentary: Time to reconceptualize ASD? comments on Happe and Frith (2020) and Sonuga-Barke (2020).

Happe and Frith (2020) list seven changes in the concept of autism that have taken place since the 80s when autism became the focus of clinical concerns and research interests. These dramatic changes, supported by additional research results, have not convinced Sonuga-Barke (2020) that a Kuhnian revolution in psychiatric nosology may be at our front door. This commentary will discuss this conclusion, calling on ASD researchers to re-evaluate the benefits of a paradigm shift in the nosology of ASD.

Kuhnian revolutions in neuroscience: the role of tool development

The terms “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” originated in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn. A paradigm can be defined as the generally accepted concepts and practices of a field, and a paradigm shift its replacement in a scientific revolution. A paradigm shift results from a crisis caused by anomalies in a paradigm that reduce its usefulness to a field. Claims of paradigm shifts and revolutions are made frequently in the neurosciences. In this article I will consider neuroscience paradigms, and the claim that new tools and techniques rather than crises have driven paradigm shifts. I will argue that tool development has played a minor role in neuroscience revolutions.

The atomic number revolution in chemistry: a Kuhnian analysis

This paper argues that the field of chemistry underwent a significant change of theory in the early twentieth century, when atomic number replaced atomic weight as the principle for ordering and identifying the chemical elements. It is a classic case of a Kuhnian revolution. In the process of addressing anomalies, chemists who were trained to see elements as defined by their atomic weight discovered that their theoretical assumptions were impediments to understanding the chemical world. The only way to normalize the anomalies was to introduce new concepts, and a new conceptual understanding of what it is to be an element. In the process of making these changes, a new scientific lexicon emerged, one that took atomic number to be the defining feature of a chemical element.

Inédit 1 (1964): Réflexions sur les possibilités d’une description de l’histoire de la linguistique

AbstractThe Wenner-Gren Foundation symposium “Revolution vs. Continuity in the Study of Language” invites speakers to discuss the applicability of Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 essay to linguistics. Kuhn does well to posit an autonomous epistemological plane, to take account of the sociology of knowledge, and to focus on the history of structures rather than of fleeting events. On the other hand, he presents each science as essentially stagnant throughout most of time, and offers an atemporal and harmonious view of how one “paradigm” replaces its predecessor; Kuhnian history emerges as a succession of synchronies. The portrayal ignores that if paradigms emerge at successive moments, old and new overlap and coexist in tension. Constructing each science as an independent system, it also neglects dynamics that cross or connect disciplines, including generalized systems of thought, and outlooks common to an entire society at a given era.Whereas sciences today are familiar with synchronic systems, effective models of those structures’ diachronic transformation are lacking. Rather than Kuhn’s or Hegel’s a priori and overly general schemas, inductive approaches based on the linguistic analysis of scholarship or researchers’ autobiographical testimonies could provide better results. In the interim, adopting Braudel’s concept of history as encompassing events belonging to three distinct chronological orders ranging from quotidian to multi-secular, we can see that a Kuhnian revolution alters views characteristic of a discipline during a given period, but only changes portions of the overall field as it has developed throughout time. This conception reconciles synchrony and diachrony. Rather than prolonged periods of inactivity, we observe a constant scientific praxis which transforms paradigms defined as open, their possibilities always exceeding their extant realizations. Such paradigmatic variations cannot account for exceptional scientific revolutions which exceed their scale, such as the invention of writing, and which represent instead breakthroughs in a model’s effectiveness, in its ability to transform reality and human experience. The contemporary project for a structural semantics aims to achieve a second linguistic revolution by constructing a new language which can serve as the science of humanity, an anthropology comparable to the mathematics used in the life sciences.

What if the revolution never happened?

This article reports a thought-experiment in linguistics, and discusses implications for the scope and identity of linguistics today. It questions arguments that linguistics underwent a Kuhnian revolution around Chomsky's Syntactic Structures of 1957, and that his analysis of the sentence ‘colorless green ideas’ definitively created a split between grammar and semantics in linguistics. The thought-experiment asks: 'What if Whorf and Halliday’s work already published by 1956 were taken as paradigm-forming works that created identities in linguistics?' It argues that these works could have laid foundations for a more productive, inclusive linguistics, better able to analyse and negotiate identities.

Archeology, genealogy, and geography of experimental philosophy

It would be uncontroversial to say that Leviathan and the Air-Pump by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer opened a new era in the history of science and technology despite its slow, filtered assimilation into the historiography.1 By configuring the ‘experimental space’ of Restoration England, the authors created a new epistemological space for the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, which helped destabilize the intellectual/ institutional marriage between the history and the philosophy of science (Laudan, 1992), reform the sociology of knowledge in tune with the Strong Programme (Barnes, 1974; Barnes et al., 1996; Bloor, 1976), bridge the sharp division between the history of science and the history of technology, and provide impetus for a comparative anthropology of science (Latour, 1990, 1993). It also helped legitimize localism and microsociological inquiry, make instrumental biography fashionable, and challenge the accepted narrative of the Scientific Revolution. Owen Hannaway (1988) thus characterized the book as ‘a rich and rewarding fruit of the Kuhnian revolution’ that had liberated history of science from philosophy of science by showing ‘science as a communal experimental activity’. The book’s impact across disciplines was recognized by the Erasmus prize in 2005, two decades after its publication. As can be expected of a visionary work, some completely missed its significance, as when Marie Boas Hall (1986) characterized the Hobbes–Boyle exchange as an argument between a philosopher and a scientist – rather than hybrid philosopher–scientists – who could only misunderstand each other, as always. The book’s relationship to the history of

The Games Ecologists Play: The Contrarian

In today’s crowded market for life scientists, especially ecologists, it is hard to stand out or get ahead. Work poured into a dissertation or long-term project, no matter how excellent, may not help, if the research doesn’t pan out or the topic becomes unfashionable. Similarly, if one does get a job as a junior faculty member, the university and universe will conspire to restrict opportunities to do original research. Finally, we all would like to start a Kuhnian revolution (Kuhn 1996), overturning some major paradigm. However, science rarely has those Crick and Watson moments. Fortunately there are ways around these problems that can help your career.

Feynman Diagrams, Problem Spaces, and the Kuhnian Revolution to Come in Teacher Education

AbstractA blue‐ribbon panel convened by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) concluded in 2010 that teacher education in the United States must be “turned upside down,” with practical experience at its center and academic content woven around the practical. It might seem that the new clinical model based on medical education, which has been adopted by eight states, would be well‐aligned with a Deweyan inquiry‐based pedagogy. Dewey himself recognized a paradox, however: preparation for the combination of rigor and flexibility needed for inquiry‐based pedagogical skills absolutely requires immersion in clinical settings, even as immersion in the teaching environment that prevails in U.S. public schools systematically socializes new teachers to a very different set of skills than those needed for this model of effective pedagogy. Recent scholarship by Kuhnian scholars provides practical guidance for an alternative understanding of how changes in practice occur and may be transmitted to future generations.

Introduction: Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 50 Years On

Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a book that philosophers love to hate. With over a million copies sold it is one of the most popular books in twentieth century philosophy, yet most work in philosophy of science has been aimed at dismissing or at least modifying Kuhn. On the other hand, and much to Kuhn’s own horror, ‘‘social studies of science’’ have embraced Kuhn’s alleged skeptical consequences. In the 1990’s these opposing views between realists and constructivists collided in a disciplinewide debate called the ‘‘Science Wars’’. After the turn of the century, however, interest in Kuhn’s ideas seems to have waned. The topics got old and perhaps philosophers just grew tired of looking back. With no synthesis in sight, the relative calm suggests they agreed to disagree, leaving the discipline in a state of fragmentation. Now that the new century is well under way, the 50th anniversary of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a good occasion to look ahead and ask what the role of Kuhn’s legacy can be in twenty first century philosophy of science. This issue of Topoi addresses this question with a mix of tradition and innovation. It brings together contributions by senior scholars who have themselves, like Kuhn, helped shape twentieth century philosophy of science, and young academics on whom the burden falls of shaping that of the 21th. Their contributions fall into two groups, those looking to refine Kuhn’s ideas and those ready to implement them. Hanne Andersen extends Kuhn’s ‘‘Essential Tension’’ between tradition and innovation within mono-disciplinary science with a complementary tension between intellectual dependence and critical scrutiny versus epistemic dependence and trust in interdisciplinary science. Dunja Seselja and Christian Straber develop Kuhn’s account of theory choice based on the evaluation of pursuit worthiness. They argue that dropping the account of epistemic semantic monism inherent in Kuhn’s ideas will yield richer notions of persuasion, interpretation and pluralism. William Rehg provides an interpretation of Kuhn’s ideas in terms of collective intentionality and argues this allows to save Kuhn’s conception of normal and revolutionary science without having to rely on meaning holism and incommensurability. Howard Sankey proposes to sharpen Kuhn’s account by adding to Kuhn’s later rejection of methodological incommensurability a particularist and naturalist conception of epistemic normativity in order to take away the sceptical basis for epistemic relativism. Jerry Doppelt asks what form of realism is still possible given Kuhn’s characterization of the process of theory change. In response to this challenge he develops and defends a ‘best current theory’ realism. While Ronald Giere argues that Kuhn’s later position is in line with his own account of perspectival realism. Visions for the future implementation of Kuhn’s ideas are developed in different directions. Some articles see Kuhn’s future as offering a new paradigm for philosophy of science, others see it as a bridge between philosophy and other fields or as a tool with applications to specific philosophical problems. Joseph Rouse calls attention to a number of less commonly recognized aspects of Kuhn’s work. Some of them indicate that Kuhn was an important precursor to subsequent philosophical developments. But Rouse also looks ahead and cites three overlooked themes that hold opportunities for future research, insisting that the Kuhnian revolution in philosophy of science still has to R. De Langhe (&) Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS), Tilburg University, Warandelaan 2, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands e-mail: rogierdelanghe@gmail.com

RISE,GRUBENHUND: ON PROVINCIALIZING KUHN

Bilingualism was Kuhn's solution to the problem of relativism, the problem raised by his own theory of incommensurability. InThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that scientific theories are separated by gulfs of mutual incomprehension. There is no neutral ground from which to judge one theory fitter than another. Each is formulated in its own language and cannot be translated into the idiom of another. Yet, like many Americans, Kuhn never had the experience of moving comfortably between languages. “I've never been any good really at foreign languages,” he admitted in an interview soon before his death. “I can read French, I can read German, if I'm dropped into one of those countries I can stammer along for a while, but my command of foreign languages is not good, and never has been, which makes it somewhat ironic that much of my thought these days goes to language.” Kuhn may have been confessing to more than a personal weakness. His linguistic ineptitude seems to be a clue to his overweening emphasis on the difficulty of “transworld travel.” Multilingualism remained for him an abstraction. In this respect, I will argue, Kuhn engendered a peculiarly American turn in the history of science. Kuhn's argument for the dependence of science on the norms of particular communities has been central to the development of studies of scienceinandasculture since the 1980s. Recent work on the mutual construction of science and nationalism, for instance, is undeniably in Kuhn's debt. Nonetheless, the Kuhnian revolution cut off other avenues of research. In this essay, I draw on the counterexample of the physician–historian Ludwik Fleck, as well as on critiques by Steve Fuller and Ted Porter, to suggest one way to situate Kuhn within the broader history of the history of science. To echo Kuhn's own visual metaphors, one of the profound effects ofThe Structure of Scientific Revolutionson the field of history of science was to render certain modes of knowledge production virtually invisible.

What philosophers know: case studies in recent analytic philosophy

Introduction Part I. How Does That Go? The Limits of Philosophical Argument: 1. Quine's 'Two Dogmas': argument or imagination? 2. Argument and intuition in Kripke's Naming and Necessity 3. The rise and fall of counterexamples: Gettier, Goldman, and Lewis 4. Reflection: pictures, intuitions, and philosophical knowledge Part II. Arguments and Convictions: 5. Turning the tables: Plantinga and the rise of the philosophy of religion 6. Materialism and compatibilism: two dogmas of analytic philosophy? 7. Was there a Kuhnian revolution? Convictions in the philosophy of science 8. Conviction and argument in Rawls' A Theory of Justice Part III. Philosophical Truth and Knowledge: 9. Rorty against the world: philosophy, truth, and objectivity 10. Philosophical knowledge: summary and application References.

Machines Fall Short of Revolutionary Science

The 3 April issue contained two Reports about automated science (“Distilling free-form natural laws from experimental data,” M. Schmidt and H. Lipson, p. [81][1], and “The automation of science,” R. D. King et al. , p. [85][2]). These Reports are seriously mistaken about the nature of the scientific enterprise, particularly regarding what theorists do and the meaning of physical law. As Thomas Kuhn famously argued, what most scientists do most of the time—which he called “normal science” and Rutherford called “stamp collecting”—does not contribute very much to the advancement of knowledge; rather, this normal science simply fleshes out the consequences of the paradigms that have been established by truly revolutionary advances. Even if machines did contribute to normal science, we see no mechanism by which they could create a Kuhnian revolution and thereby establish new physical law. In the Report by Schmidt and Lipson, a machine deduces the equation behind a sample of chaotic motion. The discovery of deterministic chaos is an example of true Kuhnian revolution; others were its application to unexpected fields like meteorology and population biology. In the constrained problem in the Report, the relevant physical law and variables are known in advance; it is hardly a template for the creative, exploratory nature of true science. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1165893 [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1165620

‘Caesura’ as Bion’s discourse on method

The author contends that Caesura, one of Bion’s last works, can be read as the equivalent of Descartes’s Discourse on Method. In this compact and complex text, the dictate of ‘methodical’ and ‘hyperbolic doubt’– so called because it is taken to the extreme form of application to the faculty of thought itself – which, for Descartes, represents the fundamental principle of philosophical and scientific research, is reflected in the formula of ‘transcending the caesura’. Bion directs his attention successively to the pairs of opposing concepts that structure psychoanalytic discourse and demonstrates their paradoxical and non‐separative logic. The binary system of producing meaning is deconstructed through the systematic use of non‐pathological – i.e. not static but dynamic – reversible perspective. A viewpoint that appears natural, self‐evident and primary is plunged into crisis and proves to be founded on what the punctuation mark of the slash excludes. Yet the new point of view does not supplant its predecessor, but supplements it. The conceptual opposition is not overturned, but merely destabilized in such a way as to maintain a creative tension that generates new thoughts. By this technique of wrong‐footing the reader, Bion achieves what is tantamount to a Kuhnian revolution: the transition from Freud’s semiotic or evidential paradigm to an aesthetic one, centred on emotional experience – to a ‘science of at‐one‐ment’. Working with the antithetical concepts of censorship and caesura, the author illustrates some clinical implications of this radical shift.

The expanded evolutionary synthesis—a response to Godfrey-Smith, Haig, and West-Eberhard

In responding to three reviews of Evolution in Four Dimensions (Jablonka and Lamb, 2005, MIT Press), we briefly consider the historical background to the present genecentred view of evolution, especially the way in which Weismann’s theories have influenced it, and discuss the origins of the notion of epigenetic inheritance. We reaffirm our belief that all types of hereditary information—genetic, epigenetic, behavioural and cultural—have contributed to evolutionary change, and outline recent evidence, mainly from epigenetic studies, that suggests that non-DNA heritable variations are not rare and can be quite stable. We describe ways in which such variations may have influenced evolution. The approach we take leads to broader definitions of terms such as ‘units of heredity’, ‘units of evolution’, and ‘units of selection’, and we maintain that ‘information’ can be a useful concept if it is defined in terms of its effects on the receiver. Although we agree that evolutionary theory is not undergoing a Kuhnian revolution, the incorporation of new data and ideas about hereditary variation, and about the role of development in generating it, is leading to a version of Darwinism that is very different from the gene-centred one that dominated evolutionary thinking in the second half of the twentieth century.