Discussion On Kuhn’s Historicism Turn In"Copernican Revolution"

Thomas Kuhn is one of the important figures in the20-centurys’historicism in the philosophy of science. However, his first publication studied from the field of history of science. The former researching method of the scientific history focused on the research of the official history represented by Sutton, and the unofficial history represented by Merton. Different from that, on the analysis of scientific revolution’s development in the scientific history, Kuhn introduced a new researching method—a combination of official and unofficial research of history. That presented us a completely different Copernican Revolution. However, Copernican Revolution was not a piece of pure scientific history works. The book infiltrated Kuhn’s historicism philosophy between the lines of the explanation about the Copernican Revolution; especially the appearance of conceptual scheme was closely related to the later Paradigmatic Thought. Besides, this masterpiece also affected the development of scientific history and scientific education to some extent. Viewing from the contemporary history, the change of Kuhn’s historicism was indispensable of the limitation of Logic Positivism and Falsificationism. Kuhn introduced the historicism into scientific philosophy, pushing the development of scientific philosophy which should be respected by the descendant. However, the relativism and irrationalism existing in his philosophy thinking also accepted criticism from many people. In the respect of the development of Kuhn’s scientific philosophy thinking, we can notice that the real value of Copernican Revolution is not only lies in a piece of works on history of science and technology, but also an unshakable point in Kuhn’s historicism philosophy theoretical system.