The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science

Kuhn, Thomas S.

ISBN 10: 0226822745 / ISBN 13: 9780226822747

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2022

About this Item

HARDCOVER Good - Bumped and creased book with tears to the extremities, but not affecting the text block, may have remainder mark or previous owner's name - GOOD Standard-sized.

Seller Inventory # M0226822745Z3

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226822745
• ISBN 13: 9780226822747
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

A must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century. 

This book contains the text of Thomas S. Kuhn’s unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the problems that it raised but did not resolve. The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper “Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product” and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, “The Presence of Past Science.” An introduction by the editor describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds and sheds light on its central philosophical problems. 

Kuhn’s aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. In his view, incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of the real world that science investigates, the rationality of scientific change, and the idea that scientific development is progressive.  

About the Authors

 Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–96) was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His books include The Essential Tension; Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912; and The Copernican Revolution.

Bojana Mladenović is professor of philosophy at Williams College. She is the author of Kuhn’s Legacy: Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, and Pragmatism.