Phil and Scientific Change

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

How objective is science? Is it a record of the way nature really is, in itself, or instead a record of our own peculiar way of trying to get a handle on nature? Maybe it’s something else entirely. What role does the history of science play in telling us how to do science today? Is good science determined by having a correct account of the correct ontology? or is there some other standard by which to judge? These and other questions form the background to Kuhn’s landmark fusion of historical, philosophical, and sociological studies of science. We will look at a number of attempts to answer these questions. We’ll start with Kuhn’s provocative view that there are ongoing, periodic, fundamental revolutions that both change our understanding of the world completely, and also hide that fact from us. We will move on to somewhat more prosaic and safer seeming answers, always with Kuhn in the back of our minds.