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The Structure of Scientific revolutions 3rd
The essay that follows is the first full published report on a project originally conceived almost fffteen years ago. At that time I was a graduate student in theoretical physics already within sight of the end of my dissertation. A fortunate involvement with an experimental college course treating physical science for the non-scientist provided my ffrst exposure to the history of science. To my complete suqprise, that exposure to out-of-date scientiffc theory and practice radically undermined some of my basic conceptions about the nature of science and the reasons for its special success. Those conceptions were ones I had previously drawn partly from scientiffc training itself and partly from a long-standing avocational interest in the philosophy of science. Somehow, whatever their pedagogic utility and their abstract plausibility, those notions did not at all fft the enterprise that historical study displayed. Yet they were and are fundamental to many diicussions of science, and their failures of verisimilitude therefore seemed thoroughly worth pursuing. The result was a drastic shift in my_ career plans, a shift from physics to history of science and then, gradually, from relatively straightforward historical problems back to the more philosophical concerns that had initially led me to history. Except foi a few articles, this essay is the ff-rst of my published works in which these early concerns are dominant.In_some part it is an attempt to explain to myself and_ to friends how I happened to be dt"*tt ito* science to its history in the first place. - Yr fi1st opportunity to pursue in depth some of the ideas set forth below was provided by three y"atr as a Junior Fellow of the society of Fellows of Harvard uttiversity. without that period of freedom ihe transition to a new ffeld of study would have been far more difficult and might not have been alhieved. Part of !/ time in those years was devoted to history of science proper. In particular I continued to study the writings of AlexYll Prefoce andre Koyr6 and ffrst encountered those of Emile Meyerson, H6ldne Metzger, and Anneliese Maier.r More clearly than most other recent scholars, this group has shown what it was like to think scientiffcally in a period when the canons of scientiffc thought were very different from those current today. Though I increasingly question a few of their particular historical interpretations, their works, together with A. O. Loveioy's Great Chain of Being, have been second only to primary source materials in shaping my conception of what the history of scientiffc ideas can be. Much of my time in those years, however, was spent exploring fields without apparent relation to history of science but in which research now discloses problems like the ones history was bringing to my attention. A footnote encountered by chance led me to the experiments by which Jean Piaget has illuminated both the various worlds of the growing child and the process of transition from one to the next.2 One of my colleagues set me to reading papers in the psychology of perception, particularly the Gestalt psychologists; another introduced me to B. L. Whorf's speculations about the effect of language on world view; and W. V. O. Quine opened for me the philosophical puzzles of the analytic-synthetic distinction
Call Number | Location | Available |
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Tan 501 Kuh s | PSB lt.dasar - Pascasarjana | 1 |
Penerbit | Chicago University of Chicago Press., 1996 |
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Edisi | - |
Subjek | Philosophy History Science |
ISBN/ISSN | - |
Klasifikasi | - |
Deskripsi Fisik | - |
Info Detail Spesifik | - |
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