Rereading Kuhn

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Acknowledgements

I thank James W. McAllister of International Studies in the Philosophy of Science for helping to finalise the text into its present form.

Notes

[1] ‘Though I had read none of Sir Karl’s work before the appearance in 1959 of the English translation of his Logic der Forschung (by which time my book [Structure] was in draft), I had repeatedly heard a number of his main ideas discussed … These circumstances do not permit me to detail an intellectual debt to Sir Karl, but there must be one’ (Kuhn 1977, 267n2). Further, Kuhn says that he and Popper ‘saw a little bit of each other’ ‘at a fairly early stage’. Kuhn’s foremost thought then was that Popper’s idea that the later theories embrace earlier ones was not viable, as it was ‘too positivist’ (Kuhn 2000, 286). This kind of reductionist view was not at all rare at the time among philosophers of science, and fits well with the philosophy of logical empiricism.