Thomas Kuhn as an „Intellectual Celebrity“, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a Cultural Artefact: In Search of Lost Paradigm
Keywords:
Thomas Kuhn, paradigm, postpositivism, externalism, (anti-)methodologyAbstract
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) has gained the status of bestseller and has become the most widely cited book in the social sciences and the humanities, while its author, Thomas Kuhn, has become a distinctive „intellectual celebrity“. Kuhn’s Structure, more than 60 years since its first publication, continues to be widely interpreted, cited and paraphrased. Once released into circulation, however, Kuhn’s theses have gained the dynamics of their own, while Kun himself spent a good deal of his remaining career trying to clarify what he had really said and what he had not said or thought. The Structure has been interpreted and reinterpreted countless times, and has produced an enormous amount of secondary literature, academic folklore, rhetorical tropes and catchphrases. The goal of this paper is to contextualise and sum up the Structure, to present the fundamental coordinates of the interpretative and polemical landscape that has been formed around it, focusing primarily on the broadly instrumentalised but radically polysemic concept of paradigm. For the sake of systematisation, the paper will sketch out a typology which distinguishes three meanings of the concept of paradigm: paradigm as an epistemological landscape, as a methodological regulator, and as a subject of study.
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