The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition
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give them thanks. T. S. K. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA February 1962 [I]Read more at location 642
Note: Introduzione. ci concentriamo un po' troppo sulle teorie finite, e questo ci trae in inganno, se guardassimo alla loro graduale formazione ci faremmo un'immagine ben diversa della scienza. in qs senso i manuali sono come guide turistiche La tipica caricatura della scienza: la scienza è fatta di osservazioni formalizzabili da cui fuoriescono formule generali. la conoscenza cresce gradualmente x fasi successive e la storia si limita a documentare qs crescita... lo storico deve stabilire chi ha fatto cosa ed elencare le scoperte che descrivono la crescita del nostro sapere. Eppure noi non potremmo rispondere alla domanda "chi ha scoperto l'ossigeno?". Perché? Perché quella appena fatta è una caricatura. nemmeno è così semplice distinguere la componente scientifica di un' attività. la fisica aristotelica era un mito? no. ma se era scienza allora la scienza nn è propriamente quello che crediamo. le nuove ricerche storiche nn hanno uno sguardo "verticale": nn si guarda alla relazione tra galileo e noi ma a quella coi suoi colleghi. La comunità scientifica ha un ruolo centrale e questo dovrebbe dirci qualcosa sui complessi processi che informano un'attività apparentemente banale e in grado di staccarsi nettamente dalla mitologia. come emerge la teoria vincente?: studiando con lo stesso metodo lo stesso fenomeno (es. la luce) si può giungere ad esiti molto diversi. più che il metodo, per giustificare il proprio percorso, contano allora gli a priori l' esperienza passata (cosa si è studiato), cosa colpisce la nostra curiosità, perché privilegiamo certi esperimenti su altri. Tutte le possibili strade sono egualmente scientifiche ma in buona parte incommensurabili tra loro: non si puo' rispondere in modo determinato a questi perché. Le osservazione hanno un ruolo necessario ma tutt'altro che esclusivo. Altrettanto importante è l'idea condivisa sugli elementi costitutivi dell'universo e su come interagiscano con i nostri sensi. Ogni paradigma ha le sue basi e cresce su quelle, in esse c è una parte di arbitrio e la resistenza di una troria dipende anche dall affezione della comunità a quel paradigma. Quando il paradigma cede parliamo di rivoluzione scientifica. Si noti poi che il "paradigma" si propone sia come premessa che come conclusione, infatti, gli elementi base e il modo in cui reagiscono con i nostri sensi puo' essere "scoperto" ma è anche alla base delle nostre "scoperte". La teoria e i fatti nn sono facilmente separabili, innanzitutto per il motivo di cui al punto precedente: certi paradigmi teorici ci guidano inevitabilmente a vedere certi fatti piuttosto che altri. Spesso poi taluni fatti debbono essere congetturati e naturalmente lo si fa in modo conforme al paradigma adottato. Edit
[I] IntroductionRead more at location 642
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.Read more at location 644
the study of finished scientific achievements as these are recorded in the classics and, more recently, in the textbooks from which each new scientific generation learns to practice its trade. Inevitably, however, the aim of such books is persuasive and pedagogic; a concept of science drawn from them is no more likely to fit the enterprise that produced them than an image of a national culture drawn from a tourist brochure or a language text.Read more at location 646
Its aim is a sketch of the quite different concept of science that can emerge from the historical recordRead more at location 649
Those texts have, for example, often seemed to imply that the content of science is uniquely exemplified by the observations, laws, and theories described in their pages.Read more at location 652
If science is the constellation of facts, theories, and methods collected in current texts, then scientists are the men who, successfully or not, have striven to contribute one or another element to that particular constellation. Scientific development becomes the piecemeal process by which these items have been added, singly and in combination, to the ever growing stockpile that constitutes scientific technique and knowledge. And history of science becomes the discipline that chronicles both these successive increments and the obstacles that have inhibited their accumulation.Read more at location 656
determine by what man and at what point in time each contemporary scientific fact, law, and theory was discovered or invented.Read more at location 661
explain the congeries of error, myth, and superstition that have inhibited the more rapid accumulationRead more at location 662
In recent years, however, a few historians of science have been finding it more and more difficult to fulfil the functions that the concept of development-by-accumulation assigns to them. As chroniclers of an incremental process, they discover that additional research makes it harder, not easier, to answer questions like: When was oxygen discovered? Who first conceived of energy conservation?Read more at location 664
these are simply the wrong sorts of questions to ask.Read more at location 667
Simultaneously, these same historians confront growing difficulties in distinguishing the “scientific” component of past observation and belief from what their predecessors had readily labeled “error” and “superstition.”Read more at location 668
The more carefully they study, say, Aristotelian dynamics, phlogistic chemistry, or caloric thermodynamics, the more certain they feel that those once current views of nature were, as a whole, neither less scientific nor more the product of human idiosyncrasy than those current today. If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methodsRead more at location 669
If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today.Read more at location 672
Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded.Read more at location 674
profound doubts about the cumulative processRead more at location 676
The result of all these doubts and difficulties is a historiographic revolution in the study of science,Read more at location 677
Rather than seeking the permanent contributions of an older science to our present vantage, they attempt to display the historical integrity of that science in its own time. They ask, for example, not about the relation of Galileo’s views to those of modern science, but rather about the relationship between his views and those of his group,Read more at location 680
Furthermore, they insist upon studying the opinions of that group and other similar ones from the viewpoint—usuallyRead more at location 682
Seen through the works that result, works perhaps best exemplified in the writings of Alexandre Koyré, science does not seem altogether the same enterprise as the one discussed by writersRead more at location 684
This essay aims to delineate that image by making explicit some of the new historiography’s implications.Read more at location 686
What aspects of science will emerge to prominence in the course of this effort? First, at least in order of presentation, is the insufficiency of methodological directives, by themselves, to dictate a unique substantive conclusion to many sorts of scientific questions.Read more at location 688
the particular conclusions he does arrive at are probably determined by his prior experience in other fields, by the accidents of his investigation, and by his own individual makeup.Read more at location 691
Which of the many conceivable experiments relevant to the new field does he elect to perform first? And what aspects of the complex phenomenon that then results strike himRead more at location 693
We shall note, for example, in Section II that the early developmental stages of most sciences have been characterized by continual competition between a number of distinct views of nature,Read more at location 696
What differentiated these various schools was not one or another failure of method—they were all “scientific”—but what we shall come to call their incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practicing science in it.Read more at location 698
Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time.Read more at location 700
What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other and with the senses?Read more at location 705
Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption,Read more at location 717
Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.Read more at location 719
The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shatteringRead more at location 727
we shall deal repeatedly with the major turning points in scientific development associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier, and Einstein.Read more at location 731
And each transformed the scientific imagination in ways that we shall ultimately need to describe as a transformation of the world within which scientific work was done.Read more at location 735
For the far smaller professional group affected by them, Maxwell’s equations were as revolutionary as Einstein’s, and they were resisted accordingly.Read more at location 740
Nor are new inventions of theory the only scientific events that have revolutionary impact upon the specialists in whose domain they occur.Read more at location 747
Scientific fact and theory are not categorically separable, except perhaps within a single tradition of normal-scientific practice.Read more at location 752
considers why scientific revolutions have previously been so difficult to see.Read more at location 760
Finally, Section XIII will ask how development through revolutions can be compatible with the apparently unique character of scientific progress.Read more at location 764
this essay will provide no more than the main outlines of an answer, one which depends upon characteristics of the scientific community that require much additional exploration and study.Read more at location 766
