Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions between Sociology and Epistemology

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to further develop Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions. We propose to discriminate the notion of a scientific revolution, which is a sociological event of a change of attitude of the scientific community with respect to a particular theory and the concept of an epistemic rupture, which is a linguistic fact consisting of a discontinuity in the linguistic framework in which this theory is formulated. On the analysis of the changes of the linguistic framework we can obtain a classification of epistemic ruptures into four types that can be named as idealization, re-presentation, objectivization and re-formulation. In the paper, each of these four types of epistemic ruptures is illustrated by examples from the history of physics. This classification of epistemic ruptures can be used as a basis for a classification of scientific revolutions. The revolutions can be classified according to the epistemic ruptures that accompany them.