Abstract

OLIVE, León. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: fifty years down the road. Rev. iberoam. cienc. tecnol. soc. [online]. 2013, vol.8, n.22, pp.133-151. ISSN 1850-0013.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was definitely one of the most influential books of the 20th century. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of its first publication, this article reviews the validity of some of the central concepts of this book. Even though -as it has been stated several times- these concepts have not all the originality that they initially seemed to possess, they have nevertheless exerted a decisive influence on the reflection on science in the second half of the last century. These concepts are those of "scientific community", "paradigm", "paradigm shift" and "incommensurability". The latter one has generated many implications in terms of the incommensurability between paradigms and between worlds, and therefore it has brought many changes to the pluralistic conceptions of epistemology and ontology. This article concludes with a review of some limitations that the Kuhnian conceptual apparatus encounters nowadays in order to account for the scientific activity that came after the development, proliferation and predominance of technoscientific systems over and above scientific systems as we knew them since their emergence in the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and their development during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

Keywords : Scientific technoscience; Community; Paradigm; Pluralism; Incommensurability.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )