Overview

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Its influence reaches far beyond the philosophy of science, and its key terms, such as ""paradigm shift,"" ""normal science,"" and ""incommensurability,"" are now used in both academic and public discourse without any reference to Kuhn. However, Kuhn's philosophy is still often misunderstood and underappreciated. In Kuhn's Legacy, Bojana Mladenović offers a novel analysis of Kuhn's central philosophical project, focusing on his writings after Structure. Mladenović argues that Kuhn's historicism was always coupled with a firm and consistent antirelativism but that it was only in his mature writings that Kuhn began to systematically develop an original account of scientific rationality. She reconstructs this account, arguing that Kuhn sees the rationality of science as a form of collective rationality. At the purely formal level, Kuhn's conception of scientific rationality prohibits obviously irrational beliefs and choices and requires reason-responsiveness as well as the uninterrupted pursuit of inquiry. At the substantive, historicized level, it rests on a distinctly pragmatist mode of justification compatible with a notion of contingent but robust scientific progress. Mladenović argues that Kuhn's epistemology and his metaphilosophy both represent a creative and fruitful continuation of the tradition of American pragmatism. Kuhn's Legacy demonstrates the vitality of Kuhn's philosophical project and its importance for the study of the philosophy and history of science today.

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Kuhn's Legacy integrates Kuhn's mature reflections and developments with his classic Structure in a clear and persuasive narrative. Mladenovic poses probing interpretive questions about the texts while also examining constraints concerning how best to answer such questions. The results support a pragmatic, communitarian conception of inquiry that she ascribes to Kuhn and, reflexively, applies to investigations of Kuhn, including her own. It is brilliantly done.--Arthur Fine, University of Washington

Author Information

Bojana Mladenovic is a professor of philosophy at Williams College. She is the editor of Kuhn's last writings, The Shearman Memorial Lectures, and his unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development.

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