Though I had heard of Kuhn and his famous paradigms before yesterday, I really didn't know much about Kuhn or his work (not that I know all that much now).
Anyway, the first thing that I learned about Kuhn is that he was trained as a physicist. Given that I have only encountered his work in the context of the social sciences this surprised me. I guess that as the book was classified in the Qs I should have had a hint as to the nature of the author's subject and training.
On a related note, I also didn't really know that Kuhn's focus is largely hard science/s (i.e. physics and optics and whatnot). That his work is so frequently discussed in the social sciences seems to have been something of a coincidence, rather than Kuhn's goal when writing the book (though this is not to suggest that he didn't think about the social sciences in the development of his ideas). The following paragraph from the Wiki article on the book seems to sum things up nicely:
In 1987, Kuhn's work was reported to be the twentieth-century book most frequently cited in the period 1976-83 in the Arts and the Humanities and the Times Literary Supplement labeled it one of "The Hundred Most Influential Books Since the Second World War." The book's basic concepts have been adopted and co-opted by a variety of fields and disciplines beyond those encompassing the history and philosophy of science.
Anyway, all of this was just to say that I am enjoying the book so far. In some ways it reminds me of reading Orwell or Huxley as a teenager.
I guess I should probably get back to work.
Score
Cameron 56
Neil 0
3 comments:
Too bad you didn't have access to the Hardy Boy books when you were a lad. They were great.
Actually, it was "Hardy Boys" series by Frank W. Dixon (if there ever really was a Frank Dixon). In the era of your grandfather, it would have been the Tom Swift books . . . and curiously enough, the contemporary TASER is an acronym for "Tomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle".
Why would you assume that I didn't have access to Hardy Boys books?
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