Structure Of Scientific Revolutions Research Articles

Behavioral symmetry, rent seeking, and the Republic of Science

Scientific inquiry, like all other human activity, cannot be separated from the humans conducting the inquiry. While public discourse often treats science as sacrosanct and scientists as devoid of any but the purest motives, the science of science literature has long understood scientific inquiry as a fundamentally social activity undertaken by self-interested, partial, human choosers with limited information (Polanyi in Minerva 1(1):54–73, 1962; Kuhn in The structure of scientific revolutions. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1962; Leonard in J Econ Methodol 9(2):141–168, 2002). In this essay, we review the assumptions of two of the original contributions to the science of science literature regarding human agents and compare them to the assumptions underlying economic models. We assert that Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn did for the science of science literature what Buchanan and Tullock (The calculus of consent: Logical foundations of constitutional democracy. Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1962) did for politics in the 1950s, which is to reassert behavioral symmetry. We then extend some of Buchanan’s insights from his study of politics and constitutions, public choice and constitutional political economy, to the study of science and draw out implications for interest-group influence in the republic of science.

The Relationship Between Epistemology of the Design Activity Theoretical Body and the Scientific

It is often noted the tendency of academia and other systemic space, like legislative, to understand the theme of design activity not only as an activity of technical-practical reflection, but as an activity of social extract and, therefore, influencing policies, generating employment, income and content. It is precisely because of this involvement that the participants' increasing efforts to establish themselves in the spaces of power, as in the field of the intellectual-scientific communities and in the field of professions organized by professional councils. The interdisciplinary involvement with other structured scientific branches, especially those of philosophical base, can elicit arguments favorable to reflections and understanding with a reasonable degree of acceptability for a possible consensus on the relation between epistemology of the theoretical body of the activity in design and scientific community? Through a theoretical review will be analyzed the work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," by Thomas Kuhn, combined with the proposition of Jürgen Habermas' dialogical argument and an interpretation of Georg Simmel's The Wing, to present an argumentative line of philosophical basis capable of offering a reasonable degree of acceptability to the consensus on the relationship between epistemology of the theoretical body of the activity in design and the scientific community. The method of analysis for the research is the phenomenological-hermeneutic approach, with the primacy of subjectivity, where the transcendental subject, integrity, owner and lord of self is the investigator coated with intentionality.

Personality and Institution - Reflections on paradigmatic structures in Max Weber’s thinking

The structure of scientific revolutions - if we follow Thomas Kuhn - is characterized by crises of knowledge and chances by changes of paradigm, a term that is mostly outside the natural sciences only used metaphorically. But also, in sociology, there are something like paradigmatic premises, questioning, research strategies, conceptual structures and perspectives of research in the competition between successful major theories. At least that could be said of Talcott Parsons’s system theory in the period after the Second World War, maybe also of the Critical Theory or later of the approaches of Niklas Luhmann or Pierre Bourdieu. Against this background, the publishers of the Max Weber complete edition, especially Wolfgang Schluchter and his students, were concerned with establishing a “Weber paradigm” more than half a century after the death of this “Myth of Heidelberg”. The essay proposes a combination of Weber’s concept of action with the development of (institutional) forms of order and their enforcement. The prerequisites of the Weber Renaissance since the 1970s are discussed and then a systematization of Weber’s questions based on its “basic sociological concepts” and their logic of grading are proposed. Aspects of a Weber Paradigm are developed from a presentation of the basic principles of the “Theory and Analysis of Institutional Mechanisms”, because the institutional analytical method was proven in various research contexts, especially in the interdisciplinary research of historians and social scientists.

The Structure of Theological Revolutions: How the Fight Over Birth Control Transformed American Catholicism by Mark S. Massa SJ.

Reviewed by: The Structure of Theological Revolutions: How the Fight Over Birth Control Transformed American Catholicism by Mark S. Massa SJ. Rodger Van Allen The Structure of Theological Revolutions: How the Fight Over Birth Control Transformed American Catholicism. By Mark S. Massa, SJ. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 232 pp. $29.95. The Structure of Theological Revolutions: How the Fight Over Birth Control Transformed American Catholicism. By Mark S. Massa, SJ. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 232 pp. $29.95. I Mark S. Massa, SJ, Professor of Church History and Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, has pursued the birth control issue in two excellent chapters of The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever (2010). The title to the volume that is the subject of this review is How the Fight Over Birth Control Transformed American Catholicism, but the focus is mostly on how and why theology changes, and in particular how theories of natural law have changed since what Massa calls "the end of the Catholic Nineteenth Century in 1968" when the natural law argumentation of Humane Vitae was found inadequate by both supporters and dissenters to the encyclical. The title Structure of Theological Revolutions, quite consciously riffs the title of scientist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that science had not progressed in a linear developmental fashion. The history of science was in fact one of discontinuity, rupture, and paradigm shift. Massa's book, as he states "rests on the conviction that what Kuhn was arguing about with regard to the macro-tradition of physical science are replicated in both macro-and micro-traditions outside of science as well, in this case the new micro tradition of natural law." [End Page 67] Massa limits his major discussion to Catholic debates about natural law in the United States since Vatican II. He acknowledges, however, critical discussions of neo-scholasticism and natural law by Josef Fuchs, Bernard Haring, and others in the years preceding Vatican II. Humanae Vitae is more the occasion than the focal point of this book, and is presented as the moment when "the unquestioned dominance of the specific type of natural law discourse (neo-scholasticism) that had defined Catholic moral theology for generations came to a climatic end." Four meaty chapters deal with what Massa argues are new suggested paradigms: Charles Curran and Loyal Dissent: The First Postclassicist Natural Law Paradigm; Germain Grisez and the New Natural Law; Jean Porter and the Historical Project of Robust Realism; and Lisa Sowle Cahill and the Search for a Functionalist Paradigm of Feminist Global Ethics. Each of these thinkers is presented with clarity, insight, and appreciation. Indeed, I believe each one was called brilliant. In his conclusion, Massa acknowledges as foundational "the magisterial studies of the development of Catholic theology and doctrine already done by John Henry Newman (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine) and John Noonan (A Church that Can and Cannot Change). He takes issue, however, with those who serenely translate such works in ways that make development synonymous with linear growth or organic extrapolation. Behind the word "linear" lay a great deal of rupture and discontinuity. Indeed, he maintains the micro-tradition of natural law is so marked by disjunction and rupture that the phrase "paradigm revolution" seems warranted. Massa's book is brilliant; a combination of verve and wit, good scholarship, and rigorous argumentation. Even those who may ultimately feel he is pushing the analogy of scientific and theological revolution too hard, will find this book thoroughly stimulating and constructive. Massa acknowledges that assessments of "paradigm revolution" are questions of calibration and perception. Revolution, he grants, is in the eye of the beholder. This book is suitable for advanced undergraduates and grad students, and should be in every university library. One final thought: Massa's book does not suggest that the birth control controversy was simply a battle about natural law. Readers' uninitiated to the debate, however, could possibly infer that it was. The birth control debate was ultimately about ecclesiology, and specifically about whether the Roman Catholic church could admit an earlier...

Author's Response

Author's Response Mark Massa SJ First, my sincere thanks to the three reviewers. It is always an honor to have one's scholarship taken seriously by scholars as smart as Rodger Van Allen, Christina Astorga, and John Grabowski. I'm delighted that the conversation about interpreting how (or whether) natural law "develops" continues in their responses to my book. My sense from the moment I started this project was that people would respond differently to it. So first: I'd like to offer a preliminary contextual observation before I get to the substance of the three reviews. The project that resulted in the writing of my book began during my final year as dean of the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College. As anyone who has had the privilege of serving in an academic administrative position knows well, one has to build into one's day thirty or forty minutes of "non-decanal activity"—reading or writing that has nothing to do with budgets, bylaws, or personnel issues (if only to keep one's mental balance). Thus, during the 2015–16 academic year I disappeared from the dean's office every day for at least 30 minutes, without my cell phone (to the frustration of my superb administrative assistant) to bury myself in the stacks of the Theology and Ministry Library. The task I set for myself was to reread the books that, over the course of three decades, have shaped my life as a scholar. One of the most important of those works was Thomas Kuhn's landmark study in the history and philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book I had read as an undergraduate in a philosophy of science course. The Jesuit community I lived in at the time included three moral theologians, two of them "virtue ethicians," and one of them an expert in Thomas and virtue ethics. How, I had been wondering for some time after our lively dinner conversations, did one make sense of the "development" of Christian morality if one set end-to-end Aquinas, Suarez, John Ford, Richard McCormick, Charles Curran, Germain Grisez, and Lisa Sowle Cahill? If one accepted all of them as theologians whose basic project was to offer smart "natural law" interpretations of the Catholic moral tradition, how might one understand the "development" of that tradition? Or was the word [End Page 72] "development" (a word that Kuhn himself tended to use in scare quotes when referring to the course of scientific research) perhaps the wrong one? The conclusion I came to was that it was indeed the wrong word unless one understood that there simply was no linear progression linking natural law discourse from Thomas to Humanae Vitae to Jean Porter. My narrative, in other words, takes as axiomatically true that Catholic moral theology has been marked by the same degree of disjunction, rupture, and discontinuity as Kuhn had discovered in studying the history of biology and physics. Successive models of natural law simply do not build on each other, despite the fact that most of them claimed be in the "Thomistic tradition" of natural law. And thus my book. Rodger Van Allen, with his usual and much-respected acuity, lucidly adumbrates the larger theme of my book: I had not set out to write a book about either birth control or the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae itself (both of which already have a number of superb studies in print, to which I direct the reader in my Introduction). Thus, it is no surprise my book is neither of those things. Rather, as Van Allen correctly notes, Humanae Vitae provides the occasion for pursuing a much larger (and in my opinion, more basic and more interesting) historical and epistemological question: how does Catholic theology "develop"? Or does it "develop" in anything like a linear, progressive, or organic manner (as several recent pontiffs have asserted—largely without proof, in my opinion). Or, in fact, is that word misused when talking about the history of Catholic theology? Thus, my book is more focused on tracing the morphology of change in Catholic theology than on the history of natural law theory per se. As Van...

The Golden Age of Philosophy of Science, 1945 to 2000: Logical Reconstruction, Descriptivism, Normative, Naturalism, and Foundationalism by John Losee

Reviewed by: The Golden Age of Philosophy of Science, 1945 to 2000: Logical Reconstruction, Descriptivism, Normative, Naturalism, and Foundationalism by John Losee Daniel J. McKaughan John Losee. The Golden Age of Philosophy of Science, 1945 to 2000: Logical Reconstruction, Descriptivism, Normative, Naturalism, and Foundationalism. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 319. Cloth, $114.00. Should philosophers of science offer methodological prescriptions about how science ought to be practiced, or should they rest content with describing ways it has actually been practiced over time? Do the standards by which good science is assessed remain stable over time? How should rival philosophies of science be evaluated, and what role ought history of science play in such assessments? This book engages such questions while introducing a range of key ideas and debates by examining the four positions named in its subtitle: Logical Reconstructionism, Descriptivism, Normative Naturalism, and Foundationalism. Why 1945 to 2000? After World War II, as graduate programs and journals were established, philosophy of science developed into a fully professionalized academic field (5). Stopping at the turn of the century is not similarly motivated, and Losee leaves unremarked whether the field's golden age has come to an end. Chapter 1 introduces the Logical Reconstructionist program and chapter 2 presents central shortcomings that led to its widespread abandonment. These span half the book. Logical Reconstructionism focuses on explicating core concepts like scientific explanation, [End Page 413] laws of nature, theory confirmation and replacement, and approaches this task in a characteristically transhistorical way. After setting the stage for understanding the prevailing orthodoxy in 1945, with brief discussions of logical positivism and work such as Campbell's Foundations of Science (1919) and Bridgman's The Logic of Modern Physics (1927), Losee addresses, among other things, attempts to distinguish sharply between observational and theoretical language, Hempel and Oppenheim's Deductive-Nomological and Inductive-Statistical approaches to explanation, Carnap on confirmation theory and its paradoxes, Popper on falsification and the demarcation between science and pseudo-science, views concerning the nature, structure, and interpretation of theories, and influential books like Nagel's Structure of Science (1951) and Braithwaite's Scientific Explanation (1953). Chapter 2 covers both external critiques of the movement and problems arising from within (e.g. the problematization of the distinction between observation and theory by Feigl, Hesse, Achinstein, Feyerabend, and Quine), along with replies to these challenges. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is briefly introduced, as is Feyerabend's incommensurability thesis. As the project of Logical Reconstructionism fell under the weight of criticism, three broad responses developed. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 introduce Descriptivism, Normative Naturalism, and Foundationalism, respectively, after a brief "interlude" in chapter 3 that classifies the basic positions according to (a) whether they have normative aims and (b) maintain that science is subject to "inviolable" or transhistorical criteria of assessment. Logical Reconstructionism said "yes" to both (a) and (b), as do other more contemporary forms of Foundationalism (views that insist some enduring principles must be accepted as properly basic starting points of any scientific practice). Descriptivism says "no" and "no," aiming only to describe actual evaluative practice, eschewing claims about how science ought to be practiced. Normative Naturalism is the view that, by practicing science, we have come to hold that some evaluative standards are more effective than others for achieving the goals that scientific communities typically have. Its proponents attempt to steer what Losee sees as an uneasy course between Descriptivism and Foundationalism, retaining commitment to (a) while sometimes disagreeing about (b) but typically maintaining that, like theories, aims and evaluative standards remain open to revision. Chapter 4 distinguishes several versions of Descriptivism, discussing work by Meehl, Holton, Giere, Thagard, Gopnik, and two other trends: comparing long term scientific growth to evolution by natural selection (e.g. Toulmin, Hull, Dawkins, Campbell, Popper, and Ruse), and The Strong Programme in which tracing causal influences of social context on practice threatens to relativize or displace the role of reasoning (e.g. Bloor, Barnes, and Shapin). Chapter 5 considers attempts to develop Normative Naturalism, in Losee's view all ultimately unsuccessful, focusing on Neurath, Quine, Kantorovich, Fine, Burian, Kitcher, Shapere, and Laudan. Chapter 6 discusses Foundationalism and its critics...

The Rationality of the Process of Theory Change in Science

This article gives an ephemeral overview of the most influential views on the nature and process of change in science. Theory change in science is one of the most important issues in philosophy of science. Scientific theories are subject to change beyond space and time. There are various factors that lead theories change such as discomfort among the theories. In this paper, discussing how the rationality of science was related with its methods and methodologies, I tried to show that it was after Kuhn’s work the Structure of Scientific Revolutions that the debate on theory choice becomes a central issue in philosophy of science. Following this the process in theory change in science can be deductive and inductive or rational and non-rational. According to the account of Kuhn’s scientific change there are four steps in the process of scientific change; the predominant one is normal science, anomalies, crisis and finally a new phase of normal science. Then I discussed some of the philosophers who criticize Kuhn’s work Structure of Scientific Revolutions, particularly popper’s criticism on Kuhn; in this regard I also forwarded Kuhn’s response for his critics. Finally I critically compared Kuhn’s and Popper’s ideas on the evolution of science.

OBJECTIVITY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

The debate on the scientific status of the Social Sciences and their bid to achieve objectivity in their inquiries is an unending debate within and outside the Social Science family. The positivists are of the opinion that objectivity in Social Science is achievable and that scientific methods can be used in Social Science inquiry, just the same or similar way(s) the natural scientists do their scientific endeavor. To the positivists ‘value-free Social Science’ is possible. This position is however criticized even within the Social Sciences, let alone in the scientific world. All these debates centered on whether or not the Social Scientists are truly scientific in their quest for knowledge. No matter the outcome of the debate what is obvious is that there is a philosophical problem with scientific objectivity in general. Based on a historical review of the development of certain scientific theories, in his book, ‘the Structure of scientific revolutions’, a scientist and a historian Thomas Kuhn raised some philosophical objections to claims of the possibility of scientific understanding being truly objective. Against this backdrop, the paper seeks to unravel the varied theoretical debates on the subject.

"Kuhn’s Incommensurability Thesis: Good Examples Still to Be Found"

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn famously argued that scientific revolutions consist in paradigm shifts in which the superseded and the new paradigms are incommensurable. My aim in this paper is to show that neither Kuhn’s examples nor Yafeng Shan’s recently proposed example adequately support this incommensurability thesis. Starting from the distinction between global and local incommensurability, I argue that, on the one hand, local incommensurability does not imply that paradigms are globally incommensurable, and, on the other, that it is likely that real support for Kuhn’s thesis that “the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds” requires global incommensurabilities. Thus, I argue that the Kuhnian view is not capable of providing satisfactory evidence that those incommensurabilities ever occurred in the history of science.

Citation concept analysis (CCA): a new form of citation analysis revealing the usefulness of concepts for other researchers illustrated by exemplary case studies including classic books by Thomas S. Kuhn and Karl R. Popper

In recent years, the full text of papers are increasingly available electronically which opens up the possibility of quantitatively investigating citation contexts in more detail. In this study, we introduce a new form of citation analysis, which we call citation concept analysis (CCA). CCA is intended to reveal the cognitive impact certain concepts—published in a highly-cited landmark publication—have on the citing authors. It counts the number of times the concepts are mentioned (cited) in the citation context of citing publications. We demonstrate the method using three classical highly cited books: (1) The structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, (2) The logic of scientific discovery—Logik der Forschung: Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft in German—, and (3) Conjectures and refutations: the growth of scientific knowledge by Karl R. Popper. It is not surprising—as our results show—that Kuhn’s “paradigm” concept seems to have had a significant impact. What is surprising is that our results indicate a much larger impact of the concept “paradigm” than Kuhn’s other concepts, e.g., “scientific revolution”. The paradigm concept accounts for about 40% of the concept-related citations to Kuhn’s work, and its impact is resilient across all disciplines and over time. With respect to Popper, “falsification” is the most used concept derived from his books. Falsification is the cornerstone of Popper’s critical rationalism.

On “asking for a kind of revolution” in clinical psychoanalysis: Winnicott’s concept of regression, care-cure, working within the realm of needs and creating new experiences

in this article, I will address the radical departure of Winnicott’s theoretical-clinical ideas from traditional psychoanalytic work, introducing a revolutionary change in clinical psychoanalysis – a transition from “extension” to “scientific revolution” and “paradigm change or paradigm shift” (to use Thomas Kuhn’s terminology of the “Structure of scientific revolution”, 1962). For me, these revolutionary ideas of Winnicott are profoundly important,theoretically and practically, as they provide a formative matrix and a mode of work and transformation that conventional psychoanalytic work does not offer (Eshel, 2013a, 2016, 2017a, 2019a, 2019b).

A hybrid approach to detecting technological recombination based on text mining and patent network analysis

Detecting promising technology groups for recombination holds the promise of great value for R&D managers and technology policymakers, especially if the technologies in question can be detected before they have been combined. However, predicting the future is always easier said than done. In this regard, Arthur’s theory (The nature of technology: what it is and how it evolves, Free Press, New York, 2009) on the nature of technologies and how science evolves, coupled with Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions (Kuhn in The structure of scientific revolutions, 1st edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p 3, 1962), may serve as the basis of a shrewd methodological framework for forecasting recombinative innovation. These theories help us to set out quantifiable criteria and decomposable steps to identify research patterns at each stage of a scientific revolution. The first step in the framework is to construct a conceptual model of the target technology domain, which helps to refine a reasonable search strategy. With the model built, the landscape of a field—its communities, its technologies, and their interactions—is fleshed out through community detection and network analysis based on a set of quantifiable criteria. The aim is to map normal patterns of research in the domain under study so as to highlight which technologies might contribute to a structural deepening of technological recombinations. Probability analysis helps to detect and group candidate technologies for possible recombination and further manual analysis by experts. To demonstrate how the framework works in practice, we conducted an empirical study on AI research in China. We explored the development potential of recombinative technologies by zooming in on the top patent assignees in the field and their innovations. In conjunction with expert analysis, the results reveal the cooperative and competitive relationships among these technology holders and opportunities for future innovation through technological recombinations.

From theAMLEEditorial Team:BeinganAMLEReviewer

Academy of Management Learning & EducationVol. 18, No. 1 From the EditorsFrom the AMLE Editorial Team: Being an AMLE ReviewerPublished Online:29 Mar 2019https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2019.0021AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB ToolsDownload CitationsAdd to favoritesTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail View articleREFERENCESAMLE. 2018. From the AMLE editorial team: Disciplined provocation: Writing essays for AMLE. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 17(4): 397–400. Google ScholarBallinger, G. A., & Johnson, R. E. 2015. Editors’ comments: Your first AMR review. Academy of Management Review, 40(3): 315–322.Link , Google ScholarBrown, K. E. 2012. From the editors: Thoughts on effective reviewing. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 11(2): 152–154. Google ScholarCarpenter, M. A. 2009. Editor’s comments: Mentoring colleagues in the craft and spirit of peer review. Academy of Management Review, 34(2): 191–195.Link , Google ScholarClair, J. A. 2015. Procedural injustice in the system of peer review and scientific misconduct. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 14(2): 159–172.Link , Google ScholarCurrie, R. R., & Pandher, G. 2013. Management education journals’ rank and tier by active scholars. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 12(2): 194–218.Link , Google ScholarDobrow, S. R., Chandler, D. E., Murphy, W. M., & Kram, K. E. 2012. A review of developmental networks: Incorporating a mutuality perspective. Journal of Management, 38(1): 210–242. Google ScholarFornaciari, C. J., Arbaugh, J. B., Asarta, C. J., Bento, R. F., Hwang, A., & Lund Dean, K. 2017. Key institutions in business and management education research. Journal of Education for Business, 92(5): 220–229. Google ScholarFoster, W. M. 2018. Our big table approach. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 17(1): 1–3.Link , Google ScholarKuhn, T. S. 1970. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Google ScholarLepak, D. 2009. Editor’s comments: What is good reviewing? Academy of Management Review, 34(3): 375–381. Google ScholarLund Dean, K., & Forray, J. M. 2018. On positioning, domains, and readerships: Some thoughts on management education journals. Journal of Management Education, 42(6): 695–703. Google ScholarRagins, B. R. 2015. Editor’s comments: Developing our authors. Academy of Management Review, 40(1): 1–8.Link , Google ScholarRagins, B. R. 2017. Editor’s comments: Raising the bar on developmental reviewing. Academy of Management Review, 42(4): 573–576.Link , Google ScholarRagins, B. R. 2018. From boxing to dancing: Creating a developmental editorial culture. Journal of Management Inquiry, 27(2): 158–163. Google ScholarSanders, W. G. 2009. What it means to be a developmental action editor. Academy of Management Journal, 52(4): 640–642.Link , Google ScholarSchminke, M. 2002. From the editors: Tensions. Academy of Management Journal, 45(3): 487-490. Google ScholarSims, H. 2016. Response on AOM entrepreneurship listserv. Permission obtained from author. Google ScholarSmith, W. 2016. Developmental reviewer Wendy Smith shares her field guide to reviewing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBIHkqirhCI&feature=youtu.be. Google ScholarFiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Vol. 18, No. 1 Permissions Metrics in the past 12 months History Published online 29 March 2019 Published in print 1 March 2019 Information© Academy of Management Learning & EducationDownload PDF

Kuhn, the History of Chemistry, and the Philosophy of Science

I draw attention to one of the most important sources of Thomas Kuhn’s ideas in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Contrary to the popular trend of focusing on external factors in explaining ...

Historical Developments and Paradigm Shifts in Public Health Nutrition Science, Guidance and Policy Actions: A Narrative Review.

Public health nutrition (PHN) seeks to protect and promote the nutrition-related health and wellbeing of populations. PHN science is dynamic and has evolved over time, helping to inform our understanding of the changing nature, scope, causes and solutions to PHN problems. This scientific basis has informed nutrition guidance and policy. Using a narrative synthesis method and guided by Kuhn’s theory on the structure of scientific revolutions, this paper reviews the historical development of PHN, aiming to understand the emergence of major scientific paradigms, paradigm shifts and evidence-informed guidance and policy. We propose that the development of PHN is characterized by the successive layering of paradigms resulting from interactions between science, social change and policy-making. Four eras of PHN are evident: the foundation, nutrient deficiency, dietary excess and imbalances, and environmental sustainability (ES). Dominant paradigms have been communicated through nutrient reference standards, dietary goals and dietary guidelines. Transitions from one era to the next indicated new ways of thinking about PHN, amounting to a paradigm shift. The bidirectional relationship between nutrition and ES is the latest challenge confronting PHN. Investigating PHN paradigm transitions reveals how we have arrived at current guidance and policies, and how PHN might progress into the future.

Milton’s Complex Words: Essays on the Conceptual Structure of “Paradise Lost.” Paul Hammond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+479.

<i>Milton’s Complex Words: Essays on the Conceptual Structure of “Paradise Lost.”</i> Paul Hammond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+479.

On the Paradigmatic Force of Anomaly

On the Paradigmatic Force of Anomaly Jocelyn Holland (bio) and Joel B. Lande (bio) No text has shaped the contemporary understanding and analytic use of anomalies as much as Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). For Kuhn, the anomaly constitutes an exceptional moment in the ordinary course of scientific activity that eventually forces a large-scale revision of the game-rules according to which natural phenomena are investigated, explained, and predicted. Oscillating between novelty and inexplicability, Kuhn’s anomaly tests the limited character of dominant epistemic procedures and encourages the search for new norms and practices. This understanding of the anomaly has come to play a salient role in both the history of science and literary studies. At the same time, this ‘normalization’ of the anomaly concept runs the risk of overshadowing a rich and complex history, one full of ambiguities and misprisions that have ramifications for how we think today, particularly for how we think about the interdependence of norms and their exceptions. In order to grasp the tensions inscribed in the concept, it is instructive to recall Ian Hacking’s introductory remarks to the prestigious fiftieth anniversary edition of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where he provides the following intuitively plausible etymology: “The a in anomaly is the a that means ‘not’, as in ‘amoral’ or ‘atheist.’ The nom is from the Greek word for ‘law’. Anomalies are contrary to lawlike regularities, more generally, contrary to expections” (xxvi). This familiar definition is fundamentally incompatible with the one advanced in Georges Canguilhem’s On The Normal and the Pathological, which was first published in 1943: “‘Anomaly’ comes from the Greek [End Page 527] anomalia which means unevenness, asperity; omalos in Greek means that which is level, even, smooth, hence ‘anomaly’ is, etymologically, an-omalos, that which is uneven, rough, irregular in the sense given these words when speaking of a terrain” (131). In addition to providing an etymology supported by the most authoritative Greek dictionaries, Canguilhem liberates the anomaly from a rigid relationship to the law, nomos. His philological work opens up rich metaphorical “terrain,” because, according to Liddell and Scott and other lexica, the “evenness” suggested by omalos evokes a range of sensory impressions: the consistency of a surface, the composition of sediment, and the uniformity of sound, to name just a few. With the privative prefix a-/an- indicating the deviation from or absence of such conditions, anomalos thus signifies in Ancient Greek the irregularity of movements and periods of time, the inconstancy of fate, the capricious behavior of individuals, and the intractable mutations of language. This widely expanded range of potential applications brings a number of things into focus. For one, it establishes the conection between the history of the anomaly and sense perception, thus rendering it an “aesthetic” concept in the most general sense of the word. It also makes clear that sight is not the only sensory faculty invoked in the early history of the anomaly. Tactility, too, plays a role in the “roughness” (or, in Canguilhem’s terms, “asperity”) of anomalies. Along the same lines, an anomaly can be an aberrant acoustic event, which calls for attention and explanation. With these discrepant etymologies in mind, we are able to rethink the epistemic import of the anomaly. It encourages us to ask how, broadly speaking, cultures cope with non-homologous, but nonetheless intelligible, phenonena and actions—anomalies that are fixtures of a culture’s conceptual matrices as incommensurable elements. Such phenomena and actions are, to borrow a turn of phrase popularized by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, included as the exclusions to dominant modes of ordering, and can be social or political, mathematical or chemical, linguistic or sense-perceptual. The revision and expansion of the commonly held understanding of the anomaly—as the paradigmatic challenge to lawful order—offers the opportunity to revisit those fields of inquiry, pre-Kuhnian as well as post-Kuhnian, in which the anomaly concept has figured prominently. In an effort to frame the historical case studies and methodological observations introduced by the essays collected in this volume, we would like to sketch out some salient features of the discursive field in which the concept moves. The...

The significance of the idea of impetus for the development of natural science

In the discourse around theories explaining scientific progress, natural philosophy of the Late Medieval Period is seen as playing the role of apologetics. For philosophers of science, with their repudiation of metaphysics, the task of providing a rational reconstruction of how scientific progress has occurred is nigh on impossible. Even explanations such as the Popperian and the Kuhnian strain under great difficulty and provide only partly satisfactory results. In his “Logik der Forschung” (1934) Karl Raimund Popper argues that metaphysics plays an accidental part in the emergence of new scientific ideas. Correspondingly, in “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (1962), by carrying out theoretical interpretations and classification of empirical facts without their metaphysical premises, Thomas Kuhn comes to the conclusion that natural science was formed under the influence of erroneous interpretations of Aristotelian natural philosophy presented by medieval natural philosophers. These are some of the reasons why medievalists are still made to defend late medieval natural philosophy from shallow convictions that at medieval universities nothing of any significance to contemporary science and philosophy took place at all. Seeking to render a fragment of a coherent reconstruction of the development of natural philosophy, I will investigate one idea of late medieval philosophy – the explanation of motion (impetus). The main statement of the paper holds that the ideas of late medieval natural philosophy have a decisive significance for the development of modern natural science instead of accidental or negative one. In the paper, following Aristotelian philosophical approach, premises of Jean Buridan’s theory of impetus will be exposed. Then, debates over the explanation of projectile motion are going to be presented, and finally, the necessary significance of this metaphysical idea on the modifications of natural philosophy is going to be ascertained.

The Law of the Series and the Crux of Causation: Paul Kammerer’s Anomalies

The Law of the Series and the Crux of Causation: Paul Kammerer’s Anomalies1 Kirk Wetters (bio) 1. Introducing the Law of the Series and the Kammerer Case It is difficult to disentangle the Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer’s 1919 Das Gesetz der Serie (“The Law of the Series”) from his work as a biologist and the notorious “Kammerer case”—the accusation of the falsification of experimental results and the resulting loss of reputation that contributed to his suicide in 1926. The connections are especially unavoidable, given that Kammerer’s scientific reputation seems to be on the way to a partial rehabilitation, whereas The Law of the Series stands as an enigmatic and dubious yet certainly influential “crossover” work. Before addressing this work itself, however, it is necessary to cut to the chase and inform the reader of a major recent change in the status of this cold case, which is recorded in the final chapters of Klaus Taschwer’s 2016 investigative study of Kammerer’s life, times and work. Taschwer concludes, without discounting the fact that both Kammerer’s person and his work were (and remain) highly controversial, that he was discredited by an anti-Semitic conspiracy [End Page 643] within the University of Vienna. By tampering with Kammerer’s specimens, the perpetrators intended not primarily to harm Kammerer (who had already been marginalized) but to damage the institute of which he was a part, the Biologische Versuchsanstalt or BVA. Taschwer thus significantly extends the work of Arthur Koestler, whose 1971 The Case of the Midwife Toad first suggested that Kammerer might have been framed. Taschwer strengthens the hypothesis by adding to the evidence and establishing possible motives. Taschwer’s reconsideration of the Kammerer case thus represents an important opportunity for a far-reaching reconsideration of the functions of power among scientific and academic elites under the conditions of intense competitiveness and politicization. Turning to The Law of the Series within this context, Taschwer shows that Kammerer’s professional setbacks and resistance to his work, in which envy and anti-Semitism played a crucial role, predated the final scandal by more than a decade. Given this overall situation, the natural scientist’s extended forays into the wider public realms of social, political, philosophical and theoretical analysis were highly damaging to his overall reputation. The Law of the Series in particular served as a pretext for his being denied a professorship at the University of Vienna in 1919 (Taschwer 186–196). Taschwer’s work is now in a position to inform and inspire further research on the Kammer case, but it may also allow certain questions to be set aside. Though it is important whether the experimental work was sound, whether the specific results were reproducible, whether they proved that environmentally induced adaptations may be genetically heritable and thus whether he counts as the “father of epigenetics” (Taschwer 36, citing Vargas), Taschwer’s work makes it evident that even if these questions remain unanswerable, the case as a whole clearly falls within the spectrum of Thomas Kuhn’s famous thesis on “the structure of scientific revolutions.” To put this differently, the Kuhnian view would no longer focus on Kammerer’s research in isolation and instead encourage the consideration of the history of the fields in which Kammerer was working. The Chilean biologist Alexander O. Vargas has recently argued, for example, that the scandal associated with Kammerer’s research may have not only ruined his own posthumous reputation, but contributed to the general disrepute of neo-Lamarckian theory, thereby delaying the discovery of epigenetics by several generations: “If Kammerer’s experiments had been accepted as authentic, we can rightfully wonder whether important facts of epigenetics could have made an earlier entrance to mainstream science” (Vargas et. al. 190). In other words, without the [End Page 644] scandal, Kammerer’s work could have contributed to the overturning of the scientific orthodoxy of his field. This possibility would have been (as Kuhn suggests) predicated on his personal eccentricity (reported extensively by Taschwer) and the specific mix of political and scholarly quirks that led him to be committed to the idea of the heritability of acquired traits. This commitment was itself the result...

Stephen G. Young

Stephen G. Young