Do Kuhnians have to be anti-realists? Towards a realist reconception of Kuhn’s historiography

Bibliographic Data

ID10813612
AuthorsThodoris Dimitrakos (0000-0001-6990-1980, University of Patras, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume202
Issue1
Publication date2023-07-10
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSynthese (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0039-7857 • E-ISSN: 1573-0964
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s11229-023-04225-z
OpenAlexW4383868351
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited51

It is quite unequivocal that Kuhn was committed to (some version of) naturalism; that he defended, especially in his later work, the autonomy of scientific rationality; and that he rejected the correspondence theory of truth, i.e., the traditional realistic conception of the world’s mind-independence. In this paper, I argue that these three philosophical perspectives form an uneasy triangle, for while it is possible to coherently defend each of them separately or two of them combined, holding all three leads to incoherence. Hence, the only option is to reject one of them in a way that is both compatible with Kuhnian historiography and philosophically fruitful. My purpose in this paper is not exegetical. My ambition is to sketch a coherent philosophical framework which does justice to Kuhn’s historiographical model for scientific change and avoids the philosophical costs of relativism and anti-naturalism. In particular, I argue in favor of the following interconnected positions: (1) Given the role of anomalies in Kuhn’s historiographical model, the latter satisfies the two fundamental conditions for acknowledging the mind-independence of the world: the ‘irreducibility condition’ and the ‘objectivity condition’, (2) Kuhn’s rejection of the notion of an ‘Archimedean platform’ does not entail that the truth-value of beliefs doesn’t play a role in the explanation of their change, (3) Adopting scientific realism is the only way to defend the autonomy of scientific rationality within a naturalistic philosophical framework. However, adopting realism leads to a liberal rather than an eliminative version of naturalism

Autonomy · Epistemology · Historiography · Metaphysics · Naturalism · Objectivity (philosophy) · Philosophy of science · Rationality · Realism · Relativism · Scientific realism · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Science and Climate Studies

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