Has There Been a Second Kuhnian Transformation in the Philosophical Image of Science?

Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is widely but belatedly recognized as the centerpiece of a philosophical shift from logical empiricism to a post-empiricist philosophy of science. The book was also an influential precursor to constructivist sociology of scientific knowledge despite Kuhn’s own ambivalence about that legacy. In several earlier papers Rouse (Man and World 14: 269–290, 1981; Configurations 6:33–51, 1998; Kuhn’s philosophy of scientific practice. In Nickles T (ed) Thomas Kuhn, pp 101–121. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002; Topoi 32: 59–64, 2013), I introduced an alternative interpretation of Kuhn’s opening promise of ‘a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed’, and noted that this second Kuhnian revolution in the philosophy of science had not (yet) occurred. Kuhn was implicitly proposing a shift in philosophical focus from scientific knowledge to sciences as research practices rather than just a post-empiricist conception of scientific knowledge. Ronald Giere (Philos Sci 52:331–356, 1985) offered a different reading of Kuhn’s significance for philosophy of science as initiating a naturalized philosophy of science. Giere also recognized that Kuhn’s naturalistic turn was at that time ‘generally rejected’ by his successors in the discipline. In the twenty-first century, however, both a naturalistic turn and a philosophical focus on scientific practice have become prominent within the discipline. My paper highlights both the continuities and discontinuities between Kuhn’s naturalistic philosophy of scientific practice and the development of those themes in the first two decades of this century.