In his mature works, Kuhn abandons the concept of a paradigm and becomes more interested in the analysis of the conceptual structure of scientific theories. These changes are interpreted as resulting from a ‘linguistic turn’ that Kuhn underwent sometimes around the 1980s. Much of the philosophical discussions about Kuhn’s post-‘linguistic turn’ philosophy revolves around his views on taxonomic concepts. Apart from taxonomy, however, the mature Kuhn introduces other concepts, such as conceptual networks and lexicons. This article distinguishes these three concepts (...) and shows that adopting each one of them has different impacts on Kuhn’s model of science. After distinguishing and assessing the concepts of taxonomy, network, and lexicon, it will be argued that the latter not only fits the Kuhnian model of science better, but it also helps capture the wide sense of Kuhn’s early concept of a paradigm. (shrink)

In this paper, I present the problem of scientific change as an explanatory problem, that is, as a philosophical problem concerning what logical forms of explanation we should employ in order to un...

It is quite unequivocal that Kuhn was committed to (some version of) naturalism; that he defended, especially in his later work, the autonomy of scientific rationality; and that he rejected the correspondence theory of truth, i.e., the traditional realistic conception of the world’s mind-independence. In this paper, I argue that these three philosophical perspectives form an uneasy triangle, for while it is possible to coherently defend each of them separately or two of them combined, holding all three leads to incoherence. (...) Hence, the only option is to reject one of them in a way that is both compatible with Kuhnian historiography and philosophically fruitful. My purpose in this paper is not exegetical. My ambition is to sketch a coherent philosophical framework which does justice to Kuhn’s historiographical model for scientific change and avoids the philosophical costs of relativism and anti-naturalism. In particular, I argue in favor of the following interconnected positions: (1) Given the role of anomalies in Kuhn’s historiographical model, the latter satisfies the two fundamental conditions for acknowledging the mind-independence of the world: the ‘irreducibility condition’ and the ‘objectivity condition’, (2) Kuhn’s rejection of the notion of an ‘Archimedean platform’ does not entail that the truth-value of beliefs doesn’t play a role in the explanation of their change, (3) Adopting scientific realism is the only way to defend the autonomy of scientific rationality within a naturalistic philosophical framework. However, adopting realism leads to a liberal rather than an eliminative version of naturalism. (shrink)