Alexander Bird on Thomas Kuhn

“Kuhn’s treatment of philosophical ideas is neither systematic nor rigorous. He rarely engaged in the stock-in-trade of modern philosophers, the careful and precise analysis of the details of other philosophers’ views, and when he did so the results were not encouraging.”

“Thomas Kuhn was undoubtedly the strongest influence on the philosophy of science in the last third of the twentieth century. Yet today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is unclear what his legacy really is. In the philosophy of science there is no characteristically Kuhnian school. This could be because we are all Kuhnians now. But it might also be because Kuhn's thought, although revolutionary in its time, has since been superseded. In a sense both may be true.”

“Partly because he was an outsider to philosophy he was unable to appreciate that philosophy of science had gone beyond Kuhn in distancing itself from positivism. And thus when he rejected aspects of contemporary philosophy of science—notably referentialism and a realist conception of truth—he was unintentionally aligning himself more closely to positivism than to its opponents.”