The role of experience in Kuhn’s paradigm

Abstract

According to the Kuhn’s historical method, one the one hand, there is no a distinctive role for discovery and empiric data to emergence of scientific paradigm and development of normal science. Discovery is not an individual and unexpected event, but it is a social legacy and has no distinctive border with invention. The empiric data, like discovery, is determined by paradigm and social education. On the other hand, Kuhn thinks that theory cannot be determined by the observation, and that, for each observation a variety of theories are imaginable which all of them are consistent with that experience. In this essay, I will argue that if an observation is theory-laden, it cannot be consistent with inconsistent theories, and then, Kuhn’s view that paradigm is the precondition of any perception, and his denying of observation-theory and discovery-invention distinctions is a main background for a kind of relativism that extends to the domain of ontology.

Keywords

• Kuhn
• paradgim
• empricism
• relativism