Examination of an Underlying Philosophical Assumption in the Theory of Scientific Revolutions

Abstract

Epistemology claims for itself the condition of being a philosophical discipline that directs its reflection toward a special form of knowledge. As a form of radical thought, it should examine the hypotheses that it takes as supporting points, making them explicit and providing their foundations. Nevertheless, in some current epistemological reflections, investigation stops at these borders. Philosophical adhesions are in fact not given without justification.

One of the theories that has enjoyed the greatest impact on the philosophy of science in the last century has been, without a doubt, the one presented by Thomas Kuhn. It had the virtue of breaking the positivist hegemony and, simultaneously, expanding the spectrum of problems of interest to epistemology by incorporating the historical-social dimension. In any case, it is not the intention of this work to consider the contribution of the theory of the structure of the scientific revolutions to the corpus of the discipline, since the success, adherence, and influence it had give sufficient evidence of this. Rather, I will focus on one of the fundamental problems that I observe in it, which I consider to derive from the neglect of the critical revision of the concept of ‘’world”, one of the underlying philosophical assumptions.