Book completed
Apr. 19th, 2023 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn. This is a very important book in the history of science – the author explains how, because science is a human activity, its progress is complicated by human nature. For example, to oversimplify, when a scientific theory doesn’t work and a new one is found that works better in some contexts, it often takes a new generation of scientists to accept it because the older generations tend to resist disrupting the systems in which they’re heavily emotionally invested. Many people are familiar with this book’s message, but most of us haven’t actually read it. Now I have!
I found myself frustrated in two ways. First, since the author was writing originally in the early 1960s, he didn’t have a lot of the concepts from psychology and philosophy that we now have, and there are places where he’d clearly benefit from them (and would likely realize it if he were able to know about them, because he often pointed out where something was lacking along those lines that I now know we have). Second, I wished he had written more about social science instead of just alluding to it in passing. In the physical sciences, everyone tends to use the same vocabulary and operate within the same “paradigm” – a term Kuhn popularized. In the social sciences, though, people keep reinventing the same wheel, using different terminology, and it all depends on who’s especially popular or who has the most professional disciples as to whether someone’s ideas will stick around once they’ve retired. I wish he’d called them/us out on that.
I found myself frustrated in two ways. First, since the author was writing originally in the early 1960s, he didn’t have a lot of the concepts from psychology and philosophy that we now have, and there are places where he’d clearly benefit from them (and would likely realize it if he were able to know about them, because he often pointed out where something was lacking along those lines that I now know we have). Second, I wished he had written more about social science instead of just alluding to it in passing. In the physical sciences, everyone tends to use the same vocabulary and operate within the same “paradigm” – a term Kuhn popularized. In the social sciences, though, people keep reinventing the same wheel, using different terminology, and it all depends on who’s especially popular or who has the most professional disciples as to whether someone’s ideas will stick around once they’ve retired. I wish he’d called them/us out on that.