Kuhn’s Ontological Relativism

Abstract

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn presented a model of scientific development on which science is characterized by periods of unified research intermittently disrupted by revolutionary change of paradigm. Ever since Kuhn first proposed this model of scientific theory change, relativism, in one form or another, has been associated with his work. There has, for example, been widespread discussion of Kuhn’s suggestion that scientific rationality varies relative to the changing rules and standards employed by different paradigms. There has also been much discussion of his account of conceptual change in science by philosophers who saw in it an extreme conceptual relativi..