Patricia Fara: belief

Transcript context

…How valuable is Thomas Kuhn for understanding the history of science? Thomas Kuhn introduced — he didn’t introduce it himself — he developed earlier ideas, and it has come to represent this idea that science doesn’t proceed in a straight line — go up the mountain of truth — that it proceeds through revolutions so that people get hold of a fixed idea. For example, they know in their absolute hearts that the sun goes around the earth. They know that the sun goes around the earth, but then more and more evidence comes up that really argues against that belief, and that becomes a sort of a crisis when the evidence overwhelms the previous belief. You flip into a new paradigm and go through a different belief that the earth goes around the sun. An enormous number of holes have been picked in Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I think Thomas Kuhn himself would agree with many of those. On the other hand, it was a key book in the way that it influenced people and persuaded them to think about the interaction between science and society in a different way. So it’s been enormously influential, although I don’t really agree with all that much of it. What is it from philosophy of science that you find most valuable in understanding the history of science, if not Kuhn?…

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