Talk:The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Re-review
Can this article get another review from the task forces? Looks like a solid article; easily could become a GA with minor modifications. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hal06 (talk • contribs) 02:12, 16 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Feel free to nominate the article for GA - if you like. I wouldn't do that myself. There are too many things I dislike about it, including the way material is organized in the "influence" and "criticisms" sections. To me it feels wrong to divide article content that way. There should be a single section, titled "Reception", that would mention both positive and negative views of the book. The section should be divided into subsections on reviews in scientific journals, popular press reviews, and evaluations in books, with the material within each of those subsections being chronological. That would be the logical approach. Some other approach has been followed here, one that seems didactic - an attempt to convey to the reader what whoever wrote it personally deems the most important information, in the order they find most appropriate. Instead of following that unfortunate approach, the material should simply be organized in a logical way, with no attempt at imposing a particular viewpoint on that material on the reader. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 02:18, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
 * sofixit Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 04:40, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I may well. The bad thing about the existing organization of the sections on the influence and reception of Kuhn's book, and the criticism it received, is that it makes it very difficult to add new material. There is a rigid arrangement that new material cannot so easily fit within. For example, I'd like to add something about the way Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont discuss Kuhn's book in Fashionable Nonsense, but it is hard to see where a section on that would fit within the existing structure of the article. It is also true that some of the existing material in those sections seems poorly chosen to me. For example the part reading, "Philip Beardsley argued that applying a uniparadigmatic system to political science would be “morally indefensible,” as it would involve arbitrarily choosing one view from among a large pool of fundamentally divergent political viewpoints. Instead, he contended that political science should strive to consider alternate interpretations, thereby achieving a multiparadigmatic state". Maybe that is interesting, but what is the connection to Kuhn's book? In the absence of an explanation of what that has to do with the book, it should not be there. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 00:37, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

Model/Animation showing the model
It seems like an oversight to me that the actual model isn't listed anywhere in this text. I have an animation that could be used for this or a simple static image could be added. Either way, the main image should probably be the model, not the book cover. No? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Awfominaya (talk • contribs) 15:20, 4 February 2018 (UTC)


 * I can't conceive how a model — to say nothing of an animated model — could contribute anything to a discussion of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Perhaps you're thinking of his book The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought, which employed several diagrams .--SteveMcCluskey (talk) 02:37, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

Edition without the author?
Can we clarify why there is a fourth edition if the author wasn't alive to edit the book? Thank you! --ExperiencedArticleFixer (talk) 14:16, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Fixed quote
An inaccurate quote was introduced in this edit in March 2016. Hairy Dude queried it this February and I've now confirmed that part of the quote was not from Kuhn. The edit introduced this sentence: "While the new paradigm is rarely as expansive as the old paradigm in its initial stages, it must nevertheless have significant promise for future problem-solving." It replaced this sentence in the real quote, to which it bears little resemblance: "Novelty for its own sake is not a desideratum in the sciences as it is in so many other creative fields." How odd. That burst of edits was all Ker64 contributed to Wikipedia. Fences &amp;  Windows  15:41, 11 September 2023 (UTC)