Os 50 Anos de A Estrutura das Revoluções Científicas de Thomas Kuhn

Fifty years ago, Thomas Kuhn, then a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, released a thin volume entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn challenged the traditional view of science as an accumulation of objective facts toward an ever more truthful understanding of nature. Instead, he argued, what scientists discover depends to a large extent on the sorts of questions they ask, which in turn depend in part on scientists’ philosophical commitments. Sometimes, the dominant scientific way of looking at the world becomes obviously riddled with problems; this can provoke radical and irreversible scientific revolutions that Kuhn dubbed “paradigm shifts” — introducing a term that has been much used and abused. Paradigm shifts interrupt the linear progression of knowledge by changing how scientists view the world, the questions they ask of it, and the tools they use to understand it. Since scientists’ worldview after a paradigm shift is so radically different from the one that came before, the two cannot be compared according to a mutual conception of reality. Kuhn concluded that the path of science through these revolutions is not necessarily toward truth but merely away from previous error. Kuhn’s thesis has been hotly debated among historians and philosophers of science since it first appeared. The book and its disparate interpretations have given rise to ongoing disagreements over the nature of science, the possibility of progress, and the availability of truth. For some, Kuhn was a relativist, a prophet of postmodernism who considered truth a social construct built on the outlook of a community at a specific point in history. For others, Kuhn was an authoritarian whose work legitimized science as an elitist power structure. Still others considered him neither a relativist nor an authoritarian, but simply misunderstood. Kuhn’s work was ultimately an examination of the borders between the scientific and the metaphysical, and between the scientific community and society at large. As he discovered, these boundaries are not always clear. It behooves us to bear this in mind as we take the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary to revisit his book and the controversies surrounding it.