I tip my hat to Kuhn in the introduction to the paper on "Hayek
Myths" which I am presenting next week in Vancouver. I borrow Kuhn's
point about how the pedagogic and argumentative aims of writers transform
the narratives we get of the explanatory alternatives which are avail-
able within a discipline -- and how they contribute to washing away the
rich character of the alternatives that existed in the past. I then
cite Kuhn as providing us examples showing how classic scientific texts
and standard texbook accounts tend to destroy the past and mislead us about
teh role played by measurement and conceptual change in scientific advance.
Later in the paper, I compare Hayek's characterization of 'scientism'
as the effort by social scientists and economists to imitate a rather
dubious (and most likely false) conception of the problems and methods
of the natural sciences to Kuhn's notion of 'the philosopher's picture
of science'. It is in giving us an 'embodied' and exemplar based alter-
native to the logistic/formalist philosopher's picture of science and
knowledge that I think Kuhn has had the most profound impact on philosophers
of science -- a distinction the significance of which is still in the
process of being digested.
Greg Ransom
Dept. of Philosophy
UC-Riverside
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