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A must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century. This book contains the text of Thomas S. Kuhn's unfinished book,
The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as a return to the central claims of
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the problems that it raised but did not resolve.
The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper "Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product" and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, "The Presence of Past Science." An introduction by the editor describes the origins and structure of
The Plurality of Worlds and sheds light on its central philosophical problems.
Kuhn's aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. In his view, incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of the real world that science investigates, the rationality of scientific change, and the idea that scientific development is progressive.
About the author
Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-96) was an American philosopher and the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, he wrote many books, including
The Copernican Revolution,
The Essential Tension, and
Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912, all also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Bojana Mladenovic is professor of philosophy at Williams College. She is the author of
Kuhn's Legacy: Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, and Pragmatism.
