Kuhn's Legacy ─ Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, and Pragmatism

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Its influence reaches far beyond the philosophy of science, and its key terms, such as "paradigm shift," "normal science," and "incommensurability," are now used in both academic and public discourse without any reference to Kuhn. However, Kuhn's philosophy is still often misunderstood and underappreciated. In Kuhn's Legacy, Bojana Mladenovic offers a novel analysis of Kuhn's central philosophical project, focusing on his post-Structure writings.

Mladenovic argues that Kuhn's historicism was always coupled with a firm and consistent antirelativism but only in his mature writings did he begin to develop a systematic account of scientific rationality. She reconstructs and develops this account, arguing that Kuhn sees the rationality of science as collective. At the purely formal level, Kuhn's conception of scientific rationality prohibits obviously irrational beliefs and choices and requires reason-responsiveness as well as the uninterrupted pursuit of inquiry. At the substantive, historicized level, it rests on a distinctly pragmatist mode of justification compatible with a notion of contingent but robust scientific progress. Mladenovic argues that both Kuhn's epistemology and his metaphilosophy are a creative and fruitful continuation of the tradition of American pragmatism. Kuhn's Legacy demonstrates the vitality of Kuhn's philosophical project and its importance for the study of the philosophy and history of science today.

Bojana Mladenovic is a professor of philosophy at Williams College. She is the editor of Kuhn's last writings, The Shearman Memorial Lectures, and his unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development.