The Dynamics of Scientific Change (HPSC30035)

The question of how scientific theories, concepts and practices change over time has long been at the heart of the history and philosophy of science. Ever since Thomas Kuhn’s landmark work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was published in 1962, historians, philosophers and sociologists of science have engaged in a lively debate over this question. While philosophers have typically sought to understand science as unfolding according to its own epistemic norms and internal logic, historians have tended to focus more on the social and cultural context under which new forms of inquiry and new structures of knowledge emerge.

Beginning with Kuhn’s much debated notion of ‘paradigm shifts’, this subject explores a range of contemporary theoretical perspectives on how and why scientific change occurs. We examine questions such as: What happens during a scientific revolution? In what sense was the discovery of viruses a complex epistemological and sociological process, involving many individuals in the first half of the twentieth century? What social, technological and cognitive factors shape the emergence of new scientific disciplines? How do scientific concepts undergo change over time? What impact did second wave feminism have on the study of primate behaviour in the 1970s and 80s?