Limits of Positivism : Kuhn T

Kuhn has made several important contributions to our understanding of the progress of knowledge:

• Science undergoes periodic "paradigm shifts" instead of progressing in a linear and continuous way
• These paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding that scientists would never have considered valid before
• Scientists can never divorce their subjective perspective from their work; thus, our comprehension of science can never rely on full "objectivity" - we must account for subjective perspectives as well

defense Kuhn gives against the objection that his account of science from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions results in relativism can be found in an essay by Kuhn called "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice."[6] In this essay, he reiterates five criteria from the penultimate chapter of SSR that determine (or help determine, more properly) theory choice:

1. - Accurate - empirically adequate with experimentation and observation
2. - Consistent - internally consistent, but also externally consistent with other theories
3. - Broad Scope - a theory's consequences should extend beyond that which it was initially designed to explain
4. - Simple - the simplest explanation, principally similar to Occam's razor
5. - Fruitful - a theory should disclose new phenomena or new relationships among phenomena

He then goes on to show how, although these criteria admittedly determine theory choice, they are imprecise in practice and relative to individual scientists. According to Kuhn, "When scientists must choose between competing theories, two men fully committed to the same list of criteria for choice may nevertheless reach different conclusions."[6] For this reason, basically, the criteria still are not "objective" in the usual sense of the word because individual scientists reach different conclusions with the same criteria due to valuing one criterion over another or even adding additional criteria for selfish or other subjective reasons. Kuhn then goes on to say, "I am suggesting, of course, that the criteria of choice with which I began function not as rules, which determine choice, but as values, which influence it."[6] Because Kuhn utilizes the history of science in his account of science, his criteria or values for theory choice are often understood as descriptive normative rules (or more properly, values) of theory choice for the scientific community rather than prescriptive normative rules in the usual sense of the word "criteria," although there are many varied interpretations of Kuhn's account of science.

Eurocentrism

More recently, criticism from a different direction has been developed by Arun Bala in his study The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science(Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). He charges that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is itself a profoundly Eurocentric work, although it is often perceived as opening the door to the multicultural turn in historical studies of science. Bala charges that Kuhn ignores the significant impact of Arabic and Chinese science when he writes:

Every civilization of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws and so on. In many cases those facets of civilizations have been as developed as our own. But only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe in the last four centuries. No other place and time has supported the very special communities from which scientific productivity comes.

—Kuhn, 1962, pp. 167-168

Bala argues that it is precisely Kuhn’s postmodern epistemological paradigm that obstructs recognition of non-Western influences on modern science. Bala argues that this leads Kuhn to treat different cultural scientific traditions as separate intellectual universes isolated from each other. Instead, Bala argues, we would have a different multicultural picture of science by including the contributions from Arabic, Chinese, ancient Egyptian and Indian traditions ofphilosophy, mathematics, astronomy and physics that went into shaping the birth of modern science.

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