Abstract

FULLER, Steve. Fifty years of Kuhn: A tale of unrealized potential and diminished expectations in the history,philosophy and social studies of science. Rev. iberoam. cienc. tecnol. soc. [online]. 2013, vol.8, n.22, pp.105-131. ISSN 1850-0013.

Kuhn's theory of scientific change undoubtedly turned out to be much more influential than its author had anticipated. Kuhn saw it as applying mainly to the physical sciences, especially when Newtonian mechanics served as the paradigmatic theory -which is to say, roughly 1620 to 1920. Indeed, Kuhn's examples from chemistry cease after the mid- 19th century, his discussion of physics ends in the 1920s and he does not discuss the biological or social sciences at all. Yet Kuhn was more influential in the fields that he did not discuss. Much of that is due to the politically evocative language associated with 'scientific revolutions', especially in the context of student unrest in the late 1960s, though Kuhn made a point of discouraging all such associations. Indeed, in retrospect Kuhn's refusal to comment on -let alone condemn- the complicity of science in the 'military- industry complex' of the period appears striking. His interest in science lay exclusively in its status as a self-organizing, self-contained mode of inquiry. But despite the many misguided attempts to harness Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions to revolutionary politics, his theory remains politically interesting for at least four reasons that will be fully explained throughout this paper

Keywords : Thomas Kuhn; Scientific revolutions; Social studies of science.

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