I have been reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions1, and, while dated, I found it quite interesting. I would love to hear the thoughts of a colleague from psychology or sociology. I feel that many of his thoughts and conclusions suffered from, essentially, selection bias as a former practicing physicist: many of his examples are drawn from the history of physics and the adjacent sciences of chemistry and astronomy with few from biology and even fewer from further afield.
However, I did find one thought potentially relevant for my interdisciplinary work with 131 and 132: the question of “Is helium a molecule?” In the text, the author asserts that physicists and chemists gave different answers to this question. A chemist says yes because it behaves like a molecule on the kinetic theory of gases. A physicist, on the other hand, may not say that it is a molecule because it does not possess the interatomic bonds necessary for molecular Construction. This is a cool example and citation for our discussion on different ways of knowing between the different Sciences.
- T. S. Kuhn and I. Hacking, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition (University of Chicago Press, Chicago ; London, 2012). ↩︎