Realism and Anti-realism debate
Thomas Kuhn, in his book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” he believed that linear progress of knowledge accumulation is not always the case in science, but rather periodic revolutions termed as paradigm shifts (Kuhn, 2012). A paradigm shift is a change in the fundamentally accepted basic concepts of a scientific field. This was a response to the already existing scientific realism. Realism proponents seem to be optimistic about the outcomes of scientific progress in solving scientific problems. It is the belief that science will eventually answer questions regarding what the world is like and that scientific theories are accurate and predictive successful in explaining scientific phenomena.
Some of the characteristics of scientific realism include commitments; that science aims to give an accurate account of the universe, that the advancement of science is sequential on a real account, that accepting a theory is believing that it is true, among others (Mladenovic, 2017).
However, since the onset of modern science, realism has been disputed, and scholars, including Kuhn, have attempted to find a more objective way of approaching and understanding scientific revolutions. The challengers of the realism ideology can be viewed as the proponents of anti-realism. They believe that scientific realism is anchored on to a myth, and they don’t think that science can be understood as steadily progressive and cumulative. The ant-realists belief that if a scientific theory is developed after another one, then the later must be truer and portray less false observational consequences than the previous one (Kuhn, 2012). This brings out science as cumulative and progressive based on the belief that science must asymptomatically converge on the truth.
In his argument, Kuhn believed that the generalized view of science as cumulative is based on a myth and that science should be viewed as historically unfolded by sequences of revolution and crises. He believed that in standard science, a theory is relatively stable and answers relevant problems and provides insights into a phenomenon with cumulativeness. However, it should be understood that a method addresses its concerns and questions, and Kuhn believes that there should be no much focus on normal science (Mladenovic, 2017). The inconsistencies that crop up later mean the paradigm can no longer be relied on and that only a new developed paradigm may be able to address concerns, at that particular time. The new paradigm provides a wholly new perspective of looking at the world. For example, Newtonian physics had a firm belief that all particles are obeying the gravitational force. Later on, the development of black body radiation brought a new crisis that could not be addressed by the Newtonian gravitational science, and a new way of looking at a phenomenon had to develop, independent of the previous one. Kuhn brings out the idea of dealing with issues incommensurably.
In summing up, Kuhn’s propositions have relevance in the advancement of science. The idea of incommensuration of phenomena means that there is no justification of terming this scientist as more accurate than the other one, or this scientific development is a limited version of the other one. Aspects and scientific concerns should be looked at independently as the developers were influenced by different things, in different worlds, using different languages and using different roadmaps to their different goals and conclusions. Therefore, whether two scientific theories seem related, they should be handled independently and enough period granted to see which one pans out.
References
Kuhn, T. S. (2012). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
Mladenović, B. (2017). Kuhn’s legacy: Epistemology, metaphilosophy, and pragmatism. Columbia University Press.