Chapter 23 - The Seven Sins of "Structure ..."

 Chapter 23 The Seven Sins of “Structure …” 

 

Kuhn must be congratulated for writing a book that many have found persuasive, even illuminating. Kuhn’s scholarship as a historian, also, must be yielded: his attention to detail in recounting the personalities and processes by which certain major transformations in our scientific knowledge have come to pass is very impressive, occurring as it did back when literary and historical research meant physically visiting libraries, searching physical records, and arranging notes and text on paper. 

 

And success speaks for itself. Otherwise intelligent and erudite readers have been quite convinced by the notions Kuhn forwarded in Structure. Written as it was by an actual PhD physicist, those readers without a science background had no reason to doubt Kuhn’s formulations and theses, and, as it happens, very few (proportionally) actual scientists ever read the work, and of those who did fewer still saw the flaws, errors, misinterpretations and exaggerations within its arguments.

 

These flaws and errors and misrepresentations are here referred to as the Seven Sins of “Structure”.

 

Each “sin” leads to the same conclusion: *science doesn’t know what it’s talking about*

 

So, today, too many think science doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

 

Remove these Sins from Kuhn’s book, and what remains is short recounting of certain specific events in the history of science.

 

And what also remains is Science itself, intact once more.

 

 

Comments

  1. JohnSeptember 23, 2025 at 11:43 PM

    As I wrote as a comment to Chapter 22, I think I'll likely bring 23 under 22 as a suffix

    ReplyDelete

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