This article reviews the evolution of public relations from its pre-science period to the present-day using Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific development. The review discusses how public relations ...scholarship has grown and reached scientific maturity, in parallel with the institutionalization of public relations’ professional practice and higher education. This article highlights the evolving nature of the discipline, including the paradigmatic shift toward a multifunctional definition of public relations and focus on relationship theories, ethics, public behavior, and technology.
When Kuhn first published his
Structure of Scientific Revolutions
he was accused of promoting an “irrationalist” account of science. Although it has since been argued that this charge is unfair in ...one aspect or another, the early criticism still exerts an influence on our understanding of Kuhn. In particular, normal science is often characterized as dogmatic and uncritical, even by commentators sympathetic to Kuhn. I argue not only that there is no textual evidence for this view but also that normal science is much better understood as being based on
epistemically justified
commitment to a paradigm and as
pragmatic
in its handling of anomalies. I also argue that normal science is an example of what I call Kuhn’s program of
revisionary rational reconstruction
.
We propose a framework to describe, analyze, and explain the conditions under which scientific communities organize themselves to do research, particularly within large-scale, multidisciplinary ...projects. The framework centers on the notion of a research repertoire, which encompasses well-aligned assemblages of the skills, behaviors, and material, social, and epistemic components that a group may use to practice certain kinds of science, and whose enactment affects the methods and results of research. This account provides an alternative to the idea of Kuhnian paradigms for understanding scientific change in the following ways: (1) it does not frame change as primarily generated and shaped by theoretical developments, but rather takes account of administrative, material, technological, and institutional innovations that contribute to change and explicitly questions whether and how such innovations accompany, underpin, and/or undercut theoretical shifts; (2) it thus allows for tracking of the organization, continuity, and coherence in research practices which Kuhn characterized as ‘normal science’ without relying on the occurrence of paradigmatic shifts and revolutions to be able to identify relevant components; and (3) it requires particular attention be paid to the performative aspects of science, whose study Kuhn pioneered but which he did not extensively conceptualize. We provide a detailed characterization of repertoires and discuss their relationship with communities, disciplines, and other forms of collaborative activities within science, building on an analysis of historical episodes and contemporary developments in the life sciences, as well as cases drawn from social and historical studies of physics, psychology, and medicine.
•We focus on the social organization of research as a way to analyze scientific change.•We propose a framework to analyze research collaborations and resulting knowledge.•Repertoires help explain the functioning of research groups and the nature of outputs.•They involve strategies to align components so as to produce intended performance.•This gives an alternative to Kuhnian paradigms for understanding scientific change.
Whereas there is much discussion about Thomas Kuhn’s notion of methodological incommensurability and many have seen his ideas as an attempt to allow for rational disagreement in science, so far no ...serious analysis of how exactly Kuhn aims to account for rational disagreement has been proposed. This paper provides the first in-depth analysis of Kuhn’s account of rational disagreement in science—an account that can be seen as the most prominent attempt to allow for rational disagreement in science. Three things will be shown: First, we find not one, but two accounts of rational disagreements in science in Kuhn’s writings: one stemming from methodological incommensurability and one stemming from Kuhn-underdetermination, which are not only fundamentally different—the first purports to explain how disagreeing scientists can nevertheless be rational, while the second attempts to show how rational scientists can nevertheless disagree—but appear to be incompatible with each other. Second, I will assess both accounts. Kuhn’s account from methodological incommensurability is not convincing since it cannot explain rational disagreement in science. Whereas, on the other hand, Kuhn’s account from Kuhn-underdetermination allows for rational disagreement, his argument why we should accept it is not convincing. Third, I present a tentative sketch of an alternative to Kuhn’s account that emphasizes the fallibility of epistemic justification in order to show that Kuhn’s argument founders. In sum, the paper shows that focusing not on the muchly debated consequences of methodological incommensurability, but on Kuhn’s treatment of rational disagreement gives new insight into the adequate interpretation of his thought as well as the cogency of his ideas.
Taking as reference the literary criticism from the English-speaking world, this essay attempts to explain the correlations between science and secularization as shown in Las fuerzas extrañas, a ...collection of short stories by Argentinian modernista author Leopoldo Lugones. By analyzing the intertextual connections between Lugones’ book and The Secret Doctrine, the ambitious theosophical treatise authored by Helena P. Blavatsky, and using also the concept of “scientific paradigm” proposed by Thomas Kuhn, the conclusion is reached that Lugones is both, a firm opponent of the materialistic scientific positivism of the nineteenth century, and a proponent of a new syncretic spiritualism that simultaneously coincides with and distances from the Christian Weltanschauung.
Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is the bestselling and most-cited book ever published in the history and philosophy of science. Yet very few scholars in those fields would ...now endorse the book’s main claims, and many are critical of its central premise: namely, that major changes in different disciplines and diverse historical contexts conform to a single “structure.” Key Kuhnian concepts such as “paradigm shift” have become part of everyday language but all but disappeared from specialist publications. Nonetheless, the book still galvanizes readers encountering it for the first time—or even scholars who haven’t reread it since their own student days. Kuhn’s description of allencompassing and incommensurable mental worlds inhabited by scientists who practice in different paradigms resonates with the experience of readers who have experienced seismic changes in moral and political intuitions.
Eres el rey de los dioses, Júpiter, el rey de las piedras y de las estrellas, el rey de las olas del mar. Vale decir, siempre que nos comunicamos realizamos acciones comunicativas; sin embargo, estas ...acciones comunicativas no son necesariamente explícitas lingüísticamente. Sin embargo, en la vida cotidiana pareciera que la experiencia común es que el mundo viene a ser mucho más estable que la verdad de los científicos falsacionistas. 4. ¿CUÁL ES EL PROBLEMA ACTUAL DE LA COMUNICACIÓN? Esas palabras son testimonio de la acción comunicativa y no del referente. 24 Su acción puede ser también una acción teatral, que igual es un testimonio, o una que disimula 'nuestras verdaderas intenciones', que es un falso testimonio porque deja fuera al otro. 25 Los famosos actos fallidos, descubiertos por Freud.
A platitude that took hold with Kuhn is that there can be several equally good ways of balancing theoretical virtues for theory choice. Okasha recently modelled theory choice using technical ...apparatus from the domain of social choice: famously, Arrow showed that no method of social choice can jointly satisfy four desiderata, and each of the desiderata in social choice has an analogue in theory choice. Okasha suggested that one can avoid the Arrow analogue for theory choice by employing a strategy used by Sen in social choice, namely, to enhance the information made available to the choice algorithms. I argue here that, despite Okasha's claims to the contrary, the information-enhancing strategy is not compelling in the domain of theory choice.
Alexander Bird indicates that the significance of Thomas Kuhn in the history of philosophy of science is somehow paradoxical. On the one hand, Kuhn was one of the most influential and important ...philosophers of science in the second half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, nowadays there is little distinctively Kuhn’s legacy in the sense that most of Kuhn’s work has no longer any philosophical significance. Bird argues that the explanation of the paradox of Kuhn’s legacy is that Kuhn took a direction opposite to that of the mainstream of the philosophy of science in his later academic career. This paper aims to provide a new way to understand and develop Kuhn’s legacy by revisiting the development of Kuhn’s philosophy of science in 1970s and proposing a new account of exemplar. Firstly, I propose my diagnosis of Kuhn’s “wrong turning” by identifying Kuhn’s two novel contributions: the introduction of paradigm and the proposal of the incommensurability thesis. Secondly, I argue that Kuhn made a conceptual/terminological turn from paradigm to theory, which undermined Kuhn’s novel contributions. Thirdly, I propose a new articulation of exemplar and propose an exemplar-based approach to analysing the history of science. Finally, I show how the exemplar-based approach can be applied to analyse the history of science by my case study of the early development of genetics.
Dieser Beitrag befasst sich mit den jüngsten Auseinandersetzungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS) und der Akademie für Soziologie (AfS). Es soll eine Parallele zwischen den ...Ausführungen Thomas S. Kuhns einerseits in Zusammenhang mit seiner Inkommensurabilitätsthese und andererseits in Bezug auf bestimmte Aspekte innerhalb der Argumentationsstruktur der AfS für eine Abspaltung von der DGS, dargestellt werden. Ein grundlegendes Element, welches Kuhn in seine Argumentation eingearbeitet hat, um verschiedene Paradigmen mit einer Metapher von parallelen Welten zu belegen, lässt sich auch innerhalb der Argumentationsstruktur der AfS herausarbeiten. Nämlich eine Position, die einen Diskurs über Grundlagen als Hemmnis der jeweiligen Disziplin versteht. Ein solches Konzept kommt, so das Fazit, nicht ohne rhetorische Überhöhungen aus, welche in die wissenschaftlichen Argumente eingearbeitet werden und führt somit unweigerlich zu Problemen. Durch die Darstellung ausgewählter Aspekte soll es möglich werden, diese Parallele zu ziehen.
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