CHAPTER I:Introduction: A Role of History

3MBDe Leon, Martin Joseph

Loyola, AlkeenPedron, Dan Micko

Development by Accumulation

◦ This is when ideas from science progress linearly or new ideas add up to another idea or what is called as the linear theory of notion

◦ In Development by Accumulation, more questions can arise that can be more difficult to answer

• Historian must:• determine by what man and at what point in time

each contemporary scientific fact, law and theory inhibited their accumulation.

• describe and explain the myth and superstition that have inhibited the more rapid accumulation of the constituents of the modern science text.

Problems of the Old Approach of Science:

Failing of historians of science is focusing on individual concepts without understanding the intellectual framework that produces them.

Proper intellectual attention to the coherence of previous theories

•Out-of-date ideas are not “unscientific” because it is discarded because there might be incompatibilities with today

• can be Myth• can be Science

• Alexandre Koyre – “science does not seem altogether the same enterprise as the one discussed by writers in the old historiographic tradition.”• historical studies suggest the possibility of a new image

of science.

Example:

““The more carefully they study, say, Aristotelian dynamics, phlogistic chemistry, or caloric thermodynamics, the more they feel that those once current views of nature were, as a whole, neither less scientific nor more the product of human idiosyncrasy than those current today”

Development is not by accumulation:

◦ The concept he introduces to replace this linear theory is the notion of the paradigm.

◦ Kuhn’s central argument in Structure is that scientific ideas do not occur in vacuums; but rather occur in intellectual paradigms.

◦ These paradigms define normal science

Paradigms frame what scientific questions are asked, how they are asked, and to what extent they can be answered.

• A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs.

• These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice“

• The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs exert a "deep hold" on the student's mind.

• Normal science is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like —scientists take great pains to defend that assumption.

• To this end, "normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments"

Rather than seeking the permanent contributions of an older science to our present vantage, they attempt to display the historical integrity of the science in it's own time. ◦ They ask, about the relation of Galileo's views to

those of modern science, but rather about the relationship between his views and those of his group i.e., his teachers, contemporaries and immediate successors in the science

The Introduction invites scientists to look beyond than just what is written in the textbooks.

Kuhn says that the textbooks are

persuasive and misleading - they would have students believe that the laws and theorems of science have been progressing and leading up to the truth we know today.

However, Kuhn believes that in order to fully understand science the scientist needs to look beyond the observations, laws, and theories described in the pages of a textbook.

He suggests the idea that out of date theories are not "unscientific" simply because they have been discarded.

He invites scientists to look into old theories to attempt to prove them today with the added technology available.

Chapter 2 Early development characterized by continual competition between a number of distinct views of nature, each partially derived from, and all roughly compatible with, the dictates of scientific observation and method

Chapter III, IV, V Describes research as strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education.

Chapter VI,VII,VIII focus on normal science, the activity in which most scientist inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicted on the assumption that scientific community knows what world looks like.

Chapter IX X the nature of scientific revolution was first scrutinize it is a major turning point for the scientific development wherein the names of Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier and Einstein was associated.

Chapter XI, reasons why the scientific revolution have previously been so difficult to see

Chapter XII describes the revolutionary competition between the proponents of the old normal-scientific tradition and the adherent of the new one

Section XIII discuss how development through revolutions can be compatible with the apparently unique character of scientific progress

References:

• http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html

• http://carbon.cudenver.edu/stc-link/bkrvs/kuhn/overview.htm#Intro

•http://www.philosophy.ubc.ca/faculty/savitt/Courses/Phil%20460A/kuhn.htm