Frases de Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Samuel Kuhn fue un físico, filósofo de la ciencia e historiador estadounidense, conocido por su contribución al cambio de orientación de la filosofía y la sociología científica en la década de 1960.

Kuhn se doctoró en física, en la Universidad Harvard en 1949 y tuvo a su cargo un curso académico sobre la Historia de la Ciencia en dicha universidad de 1948 a 1956. Luego de dejar el puesto, Kuhn dio clases en la Universidad de California, Berkeley hasta 1964, en la Universidad de Princeton hasta 1979 y en el Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts hasta 1991.

En 1962, Kuhn publicó The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , obra en la que expuso la evolución de las ciencias naturales básicas de un modo que se diferenciaba de forma sustancial de la visión más generalizada entonces. Según Kuhn, las ciencias no progresan siguiendo un proceso uniforme por la aplicación de un hipotético método científico. Se verifican, en cambio, dos fases diferentes de desarrollo científico. En un primer momento, hay un amplio consenso en la comunidad científica sobre cómo explotar los avances conseguidos en el pasado ante los problemas existentes, creándose así soluciones universales que Kuhn llamaba «paradigma».

El término «paradigma» designa todos los compromisos compartidos por una comunidad de científicos. Por un lado, los teóricos, ontológicos, y de creencias y, por otro, los que hacen referencia a la aplicación de la teoría y a los modelos de soluciones de problemas. Los paradigmas son, por tanto, algo más que un conjunto de axiomas [cita requerida]. Tuvo algunas diferencias con Herbert Blumer principalmente por cuestión de ciencia y metodologías. Kuhn acepta el enfoque del interaccionismo simbólico sobre actores y sus pensamientos al igual que sus acciones.

La última etapa de su pensamiento está teñida por un marcado darwinismo. Abandona casi por completo el discurso acerca de los paradigmas, y restringe el concepto de revolución científica al de un proceso de especiación y especialización por el cual una disciplina científica va acotando los márgenes de su objeto de estudio, alejándose de los horizontes de otras especialidades. En este último sentido, como una forma de holismo restringido que afecta las distintas ramas del desarrollo científico, reaparece el concepto de inconmensurabilidad teórica, el único que Kuhn parece haber mantenido incólume hasta el final de sus días. Wikipedia  

✵ 18. julio 1922 – 17. junio 1996
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Thomas Kuhn: Frases en inglés

“In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.”

Thomas Kuhn libro The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Fuente: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), VI. Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries, p. 64 (2012 ed.)

“Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense… that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way.”

Thomas Kuhn libro The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Fuente: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), VII. Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories, p. 91 (2012 ed.)

“Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.”

Thomas Kuhn libro The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), I. Introduction: A Role of History

“History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.”

Thomas Kuhn libro The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), I. Introduction: A Role of History

“Few people who are not actually practitioners of a mature science realize how much mop-up work of this sort a paradigm leaves to be done or quite how fascinating such work can prove in the execution.”

Thomas Kuhn libro The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Fuente: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), III. The Nature of Normal Science, p. 24 (2012 ed.)

“I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all. … How could his characteristic talents have deserted him so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had so deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? … I was sitting at my desk with the text of Aristotle's Physics open in front of me… Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I'd never dreamed possible. Now I could understand why he had said what he'd said, and what his authority had been. Statements that had previously seemed egregious mistakes, now seemed at worst near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition. That sort of experience -- the pieces suddenly sorting themselves out and coming together in a new way -- is the first general characteristic of revolutionary change that I shall be singling out after further consideration of examples. Though scientific revolutions leave much piecemeal mopping up to do, the central change cannot be experienced piecemenal, one step at a time. Instead, it involves some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some part of the flux of experience sorts itself out differently and displays patterns that were not visible before.”

Fuente: The Road Since Structure (2002), p. 16-17; from "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" (1982)

“Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.”

Thomas Kuhn (1970) in Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?, edited by [Imre Lakatos, Alan Musgrave, Criticism and the growth of knowledge, Cambridge University Press, 1970, 0521096235, 7]

“By now it may be clear that the position I'm developing is a sort of post-Darwinian Kantianism.”

Fuente: The Road Since Structure (2002), p. 104; from "The Road since Structure" (1990)

“We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth”

Thomas Kuhn libro The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Fuente: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), XIII. Progress Through Revolutions, p. 170

“A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.””

Thomas Kuhn libro The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth’ for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle’s than either of them is to Newton’s.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Postscript (1969)

“If a demarcation criterion exists (we must not, I think, seek a sharp or decisive one), it may lie just in that part of science which Sir Karl ignores.”

"Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970)

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