Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in South Korea

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Notes

1 The Korean translation of Skocpol's book was published in 1981, the same year that one of the Korean translations of Kuhn's Structure was published. The publisher, Kachibooks, later obtained the copyright for the third edition of Kuhn's Structure and published its only current translation.

2 KISS (Korean Studies Information Service System; kiss.kstudy.com) started its Web-based service in 1995; DBPIA (www.dbpia.co.kr) started in 1999. Their journal lists partially overlap, and together they cover most of the academic journals at least from the 1990s, with some articles from the older period as early as the 1970s.

3 An interesting analogy is found regarding the Korean reception of another classic, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, also published in 1962, the same year as Structure. Although Carson's book is widely read and frequently mentioned in environmental philosophy, environmental education, and environmental sociology literature, serious academic analysis of Carson's book is very rare in Korea.

4 The English word normal has two distinctive meanings: common (and therefore taking up most of scientific research) and constituting a standard (and therefore perhaps a norm-setting type of research). Kuhn made it clear that he meant the first when he introduced the concept of “normal science” in Structure. Unfortunately, the second meaning is much more naturally associated in the Korean mind when we hear 정상, the Korean expression for “normal.”