DEVELOPMENTS IN THOMAS KUHN’S THEORY OF PERCEPTION OF
SIMILARITY RELATIONSHIPS IN SCIENCE
by Dr. Douglas I. O Anele
By 2012, it would be 50 years since the first edition of Thomas S. Kuhn’s provocative
magnum opus, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was published. Some of the contentious
views expressed in that work, such as the essential role of perception of similarity relations in
the acquisition and consolidation of scientific knowledge, the notion that revolutions in science
lead to incommensurability and partial communication across the revolutionary divide, the noncumulative
nature of the conceptual hiatus between the developmental stages separated by
scientific revolutions etc, are still being debated by scholars. As a contribution to the debate on
Kuhn’s philosophy of science, this paper focuses on developments in the theory of scientific
perception and cognition which Kuhn developed in deliberate opposition to logical positivism
and falsificationism. Kuhn, it must be said, articulated his distinctive doctrines with the
“rationality” claims of positivists and falsificationists concepts. He dissected the weaknesses of
those claims, and presented a theory he hoped would liberate science from what he saw as the
procrustean bed built for it by the rationalists. To contexualise Kuhn’s ideas on scientific
learning through perception, the paper undertakes a brief critique of selected epistemological
schools of thought in the philosophy of science. It discusses Kuhn’s theory on the role of
perception of learned similarity relationships in the world-constituting activity of scientists. The
paper investigates the development of the theory by Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Nancy Nercessian
and Howard Margolis to further substantiate the claim that shared neural reprogrammable
pattern-recognition processes, not adherence to explicit rules and definitions, constitute the major
epistemological strategy in the scientific cognition of reality. Finally, the paper argues that,
contrary to Kuhn’s hyperbolic interpretation of communication difficulties across the
revolutionary divide, cognitivist analysis of conceptual change and its aftermath shows that
scientists can operate fluently with new theories and the old ones they replace.
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