Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

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184302

Which way is up?

Thomas S. Kuhn's analogy to conceptual development in childhood

Alexander T. Levine

pp. 197-212

Abstract

In the Preface to his Structure Of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn let it be known that his view of scientific development was indebted to the work of pioneering developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget's model of conceptual development in childhood, on which the child passes through several discontinuous stages, served as the template for Kuhn's reading of the history of a scientific discipline, on which mutually incommensurable periods of normal science are separated by scientific revolutions. The analogy to conceptual change in childhood pervades Kuhn's corpus, serving as the central motif in his well-known essays, "A Function for Thought Experiments' and' second Thoughts on Paradigms'. But it is deeply problematic. For as a careful student of Piaget might note, Piaget, and the developmental psychologists he inspired, relied on the same analogy, but with the order of epistemic dependencies reversed. One begins to worry that Kuhn's use of the analogy, and its subsequent re-use by developmental psychologists, sneaks a vicious circularity into our understanding of important processes. This circularity is grounds for some concern on the part of science educators accustomed to employing such Kuhnian notions as "incommensurability' and "paradigm'.

Publication details

Published in:

Bevilacqua Fabio, Giannetto Enrico, Matthews Michael R. (2001) Science education and culture: the contribution of history and philosophy of science. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 197-212

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-0730-6_14

Full citation:

Levine Alexander T. (2001) „Which way is up?: Thomas S. Kuhn's analogy to conceptual development in childhood“, In: F. Bevilacqua, E. Giannetto & M. R. Matthews (eds.), Science education and culture, Dordrecht, Springer, 197–212.