Paul Churchland on Thomas Kuhn

“To introduce my story, I take the reader back to 1962, when the academic world saw the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolution, by Thomas Kuhn. … Most certainly, it upset my own Logical Empiricist assumptions. It had that effect for two reasons. The first was his claim, vividly documented, that past scientific revolutions were not the unambiguous expression of sheerly logical and experimental factors, rationally played out according to a well-defined methodology. Rather, they were the expression of a variety of nonlogical factors as well: social, psychological, metaphysical, technological, aesthetic, and personal. … The second reason for the ensuing controversy was his claim, also well-documented, that the unit of scientific understanding is not the sentence, or set of sentences, but rather the so-called "paradigm", or family of paradigms.”

“In fact, Kuhn is decidedly conservative in his methodological impulses. If science is politics, then he is a staunch Tory, not an anything-goes radical. In fact, Kuhn was not attacking scientific standards. Rather, he was attacking a false and confabulatory theory about the nature of scientific standards, a worthy and nontrivial philosophical theory called Logical Empiricism, a theory that tried to capture all such standards in narrowly logical terms. If one already accepts that orthodox but confabulatory theory, as most philosophers did, then one is doomed to see an attack on it as an attack on scientific standards in general. But it needn't be so. Once we have seen that a scientific theory is much more than a set of sentences, then we can appreciate that its evaluation must encompass much more than mere logical relations among sentences. Once we are freed from the grip of the orthodox philosophical approach, we can pursue the question of theory evaluation with a fresh eye.”