Kuhn. Philosopher of scientific revolution

Thomas Kuhn´s shadow hangs over almost every field of intellectual inquiry. His influence upon social science, historiography, law, philosophy, feminism, theology and the natural sciences is unparalleled. His epoch-making concepts of new paradigm and scientific revolutions make him probably the most influential academic of the 20th century. Yet this book argues that Kuhn has been catastrophically misunderstood. The authors draw on ethnomethodological sociology and Wittgensteinian philosophy and utlilize Kuhn´s own startling reactions to his fame and influence. They argue that the Kuhn who appauls realists, followers of Karl Popper and some natural scientists, and the same Kuhn who delights relativists, postmodernists and practitioners of science studies, is a sheer figment of cultural fantasy, bearing little or no relation to the actual author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn´s million-selling contemporary classic. Sharrock and Read take the introductory reader through Kuhn´s work in a careful and accessible way, accenting particularly what previous writers have neglected.They also provide explanations, defences of and, where appropriate, criticisms of Kuhn´s central concept of incommensurability, and tackle head on the crucial issue of whether Kuhn´s insights concerning the natural sciences can be extrapolated to other disciplines, such as the social sciences. This work on Kuhn is sympathetic to his enormous and even more enormously-misunderstood achievement: the giving of a concrete and accurate account of the nature of stability, ordinary work and the conceptual change in the natural sciences.