Kuhn’s ‘Does Knowledge “Grow”?’: Second Thoughts on the Nature of Epistemic Progress

This chapter is an examination of Thomas S. Kuhn’s Foerster Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976. At that moment, Kuhn was beginning to reexamine some of his main theses in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A special emphasis was made on the relationship between his account of scientific revolutions and the nature of knowledge. As he was a critic of traditional foundationalism, he opted for a different point of view, more sympathetic to his renewing perspective. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and John L. Austin’s writings inspired in him a new account of the grounds for knowledge-claims, as opposed to those for belief-claims. In that lecture, Kuhn related this new account to his explanation of scientific change and drew some conclusions on the question concerning the ‘growth’ of knowledge.