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I have been rather stunned by the easy identification Wade Hands and now
John Davis have made between the work of Thomas Kuhn and self-identified
workers in SSK. In a host of ways Kuhn's work is very far from either
traditional or SSK sociology .. and Kuhn and a number of others have been
very clear in rejecting the account of his work provided by sociologists
and traditional philosophers of science. Yet just this version of Kuhn --
the version of the sociologists and traditional analytic philosophers of
science seems to be the one adopted by economists working on the problems
of the advance of science. Like the work of Wittgenstein, Hayek, and
Polanyi, Kuhn's work cuts against the traditional 'theoretical' categories
of traditional 'atomic' & 'holistic' social science as provided by most
economists and sociologists. As a scientific explanatory framework Kuhn's
work really can be modeled as an invisible hand process which combines
elements of the sort of invisible hand processes found in the work of
Darwin, Hayek, and Wittgenstein. I demonstrate this in several working
papers (now available on the internet at
http://members.aol.com/gregransom/ransom.htm). These processes are at once
'institutional', embodied, and included selective elements, while as
explanations they reject or are not dependent on traditional 'rational
choice' or 'holistic causal factors' of the kind reified in traditional
neo-classical economics and holistic sociology. Work of this kind,
developing aspects of Kuhn's own work, can be found in the writings of
Walter Weimer and Don Lavoie, among others.
The problem with reading Kuhn through the lens of the traditional
sociologist and philosopher of science is that the significance of the
insight that science is not ahistorical or that science has a social
dimension becomes something else again than what can be found in Kuhn's own
account. In fact, you loose the most substantive contributions found in
Kuhn on the nature of science, and the process of its development and
advance -- you end up steam rolling over the substantive insights found in
Kuhn regarding the primacy of training with examples -- an element of
science with an inherently universalizing dimension. But this is only one
example among a host of them.
REFERENCES
Don Lavoie, _National Economic Planning: What is Left?_, 1985.
Walter Weimer, _Notes on Methodology of Scientific Research_, 1979.
Walter Weimer, "For and Against Method: Reflections on Feyerabend
and the Foibels of Philosophy", _Pre/Text_, Vol. 1-2, 1980, 161-203.
Walter Weimer, "Beyond Suppe in Methodology", _New Ideas Psychol._,
Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 115-118.
Greg Ransom
Dept. of Philosophy
UC-Riverside
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