Scientific Revolutions
Largely as the result of Thomas Kuhn's work, the concept of scientific revolution gains an importance in postpositivist philosophy of science that it lacks in the dominant logical empiricist tradition of the twentieth century. Kuhn's notion of scientific revolution becomes wedded to a historical relativism concerning scientific knowledge that many have sought to refute, or overcome with new accounts of knowledge that go beyond positivism and relativism.
The Conception of Scientific Revolution in Traditional Philosophy of Science
To set the context for these debates, it is useful to begin with the ordinary concept of scientific revolution and understand why it lacks fundamental epistemological significance in traditional philosophy of science. In ordinary parlance, a scientific revolution is a large-scale change in the fundamental concepts, theories, or methods that scientists in some area of inquiry emply to understand the course of nature (e.g., the Copernican revolution in astronomy). Such a change is also thought to be revolutionary in so far as it provokes similarly dramatic alterations in the way laypeople see the world. As such, the notion is obviously important to historians of science and popular culture. On the other hand, scientific revolution is not a central topic for the tradition of logical positivism (more broadly, logical empiricism) that generates the key figures, problems, and models of philosophy of science for most of the twentieth century.
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