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iking and enduring, but it would be premature to say that it actually has these elements. When scientists abandoned the Ptolemaic theory in favour of the heliocentric theory they recognised that all of the things that could be accounted for on the Ptolemaic theory would probably be explicable on the heliocentric theory, and further that it may source promising ways of tackling puzzles that had proved difficult on the Ptolemaic theory, although actually doing this lay in the future.

Many commentators have taken the Austrian-born London philosopher Sir Karl Popper (1902 – 1994) as the nemesis of Kuhn, and have contrasted Kuhn’s approach with what they have called Popper’s rationalism (although Popper regarded himself not as a rationalist in the Continental Rationalist tradition, but as a legatee of the sceptical Scottish philosopher David Hume, and as an empiricist firmly in the great tradition of British Empiricism). Kuhn’s approach is often called one of Descriptive Realism. Popper did not purport to describe how scientists actually proceeded and as such he would not necessarily have any quarrel with Kuhn’s account. Rather, he attempted to give a rational reconstruction not of scientific practice but of what he called (the title of one of his important books) ‘the Logic of Scientific Discovery’. His test of whether a proposition was genuinely scientific was whether it was empirically falsifiable. He could readily acknowledge that scientists do not easily abandon a central proposition in the light of what appears to be one counter-example, but will look for a way of saving it, e.g. by amending it or amending something else in the containing theory which would forestall the counter-example; in other words look for a patch. The reason they have to do this is because they recognise the incompatibility. Popper does not purport to be describing the practice of scientific evolution historically, so one could argue that they are answering different questions, not offering competing answers to the same question(s).

The main criticism of Kuhn is that his notion of a paradigm is itself too under-developed and unclear to be a useful conceptual tool in explaining scientific revolutions. By and large there is acknowledgement that there is more to a scientific position than a bunch of theories, laws, and discoveries; there is also what might be called the culture of scientific practice, including social and professional practice, within which the theories and laws and discoveries are embedded, and which, via its enforcers, determines the legitimacy or otherwise of practices and practitioners within that scientific position.

5. Kuhn and the Social Sciences.

Kuhn is surely correct in his contention that by and large his notion of a paradigm does not have application beyond the natural sciences. Many of the social sciences are concerned not so much with discoveries that can be built upon and accumulated but with, for example, techniques for analysing situations, and techniques for achieving specific social objectives.

When practitioners of these disciplines talk of paradigms they sometimes appear to be talking of methodologies for achieving whatever are the objectives of the social science (which themselves may be contentious) and sometimes of what are better described as ideological frameworks, where an ideology is a collection of beliefs and values held for other than purely epistemic reasons (reasons to d本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。