Thomas Kuhn and Michael Oakeshott

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is certainly the most influential book in terms of the way modern philosophy of science is conducted. It discusses how Kuhn's theory of the process of scientific revolutions stems from his belief that scientific progress is not made in some tidy rational way, but, in fact, proceeds in a way that is based on all sorts of nonrational systems. In comparison, it looks at how Michael Oakeshott's "Experience and its Modes" doesn't discuss the history of scientific revolutions, per se, and there are a great number of resonances between Oakeshott's and Kuhn's respective projects. It shows how Oakeshott's work is generally more holistic in its overall reach as it attempts to discuss the limits and nature of human epistemology on a grand scale and how his work is relevant to Kuhn's because he does consider science as one of these modes of epistemology.

From the Paper:

"Thus, the radical argument here in Kuhn's idea is that science is not a rational process of gradual adding to already known information as theorists often claim. Rather, it is a turbulent dynamic system, in which ways of knowing are constantly shifting in dynamic ways that attack the basic epistemology of science. Anyone who doubts that basic epistemological issues are at the heart of many scientific debates rather than just accumulating new knowledge would do well to look at Quantum Mechanic for example, which, unlike most of the rest of science, claims that you cannot necessarily predict the outcome of a specific event, only the probability of a specific outcome."

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