Kuhn’s Theory of Concepts  

Oleh:

Andersen, Hanne ; Barker, Peter ; Chen, Xiang

Jenis: Article from Books - E-Book
Dalam koleksi: The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions, page 19-41.
Topik: Kuhn’s Theory; Learning Procedure; Similarity; Dissimilarity; and Kind Hierarchies; Knowledge of Ontology and Knowledge of Regularities; Individual Differences and Graded Structures
Fulltext: Kuhn’s Theory of Concepts.pdf (391.58KB)

Isi artikel

After the appearance of The Structure of Scienti?c Revolutions in 1962 Kuhn attempted to develop a Wittgensteinian account of family resemblance concepts for a domain that other philosophers had found most unlikely: scienti?c concepts. In the 1970 postscript to Structure Kuhn even suggested that the variants of Newton’s second law that applied to different physical systems showed family resemblance, but no single de?ning properties. If this proved to be the general case, the most important examples of scienti?c concepts might turn out to be family resemblance concepts rather than the well-behaved concepts, analyzable by necessary and suf?cient conditions, expected by earlier philosophers of science. Kuhn returned to these themes again and again in his later philosophical writings. Kuhn’s theory of concepts focused on a restricted class of terms, namely, kind terms. As Kuhn de?ned kind terms they are “primarily the count nouns together with the mass nouns, words which combine with count nouns in phrases that take the inde?nite article. Some terms require still further tests hinging, for example, on permissible suf?ces” (Kuhn 1991: 92). Thus, kind terms include natural kinds, artifactual kinds, and social kinds.

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