2025/04/22 by Deivide Garcia da Silva Oliveira · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #History of Science and Medicine
paper · pdf · doi:10.48160/18532330me15.373
openalex publication_date 2025/04/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
The book is part of a worldwide celebration around Thomas S. Kuhn's centenary, the impact of his work on philosophy and other disciplines, and what Kuhn's legacy does to the task of understanding science.The book is itself not only a result of intense research but also a rich debate of worldwide specialists about Kuhn's work and beyond Kuhn's work that happened in the II Colloquium in the Philosophy and History of Science Ro de la Plata 2018 "Kuhnian Studies: Past, Present and Future", held in Argentina and Uruguay.The book's aim, which was achieved through expertise, debate, and audience participation, was to go beyond the mere exegesis and interpretation of Kuhn's work.This book aims to present a perspective on Kuhn's work, which went through a live debate among experts.It is a perspective born from the community's minimal consensus, exploring topics within and outside the philosophy of science.Naturally, since the book is built from that colloquium, by the end of the book, the reader can have their own view about how much Kuhn's ideas are still alive in many areas, but also why they are still important to fundamentally understand scientists' work.This is allowed due to the diversity of authors, each shedding light on one subject of Kuhn's work or consequence instead of a single author thinking about all these subjects.The book has ten chapters, each exploring different subjects and aspects of Kuhn's work under direct dialogue.In this sense, my aim in this review is to briefly present these ten chapters, highlight that dialogue, and build a mosaic from them, specifically showing how the book advances the work about Kuhn's philosophy.The chapter 1, "Kuhn, Coherentism and Perception" by H. Sankey, aims to develop further Kuukkanen's claim that Kuhn's view on science could be approached under coherentist terms.In other words, this is a chapter about epistemology, focusing on the theory of epistemic justification in Kuhn's account of science.The idea is to address questions whose answers were initially explored by Kuukkanen.According to Kuukkanen's coherentist interpretation of Kuhn's anti-foundationalism, these positions are aligned.The main reason for this is that epistemic consistency and accuracy in Kuhn's coherentism should be seen within an interconnected belief system.Sankey critiques Kuukkanen's coherentist interpretation as a shortfall since it lacks a crucial coherentist element: the rejection of non-doxastic sources (e.g., perceptual experiences) as justifications.Because of this critique, a path for Sankey to address the input objection to coherentism is an argument that our internally coherent system of belief is isolated from the inputs of reality (which is why another name for input objection is isolation objection).So, the justification from reality for our set of beliefs is not incorporated.According to Sankey, Kuhn's complex position relative to empiricist and coherentist paradigms shows why coherentism in Kuhn is not so simple, especially considered that Kuhn's work lacks the crucial element of coherentism, it "fails to explicitly deny the existence of basic beliefs which have a non-doxastic source of justification" (Giri, Melogno & Miguel 2023, p. 12).Sankey's text also carries another lesson; by