Monday, January 29, 2007

Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution

I'm wondering if this book continues to make any sense as a reading in sociology of science and technology courses. On the one hand, it is without a doubt a classic in the field. On the other hand, it is inordinately repetitive and the field has moved far beyond this kind of structural functionalist agenda. In a way, Merton gives you more meat to deal with given the normative and institutional focus though I tend to have issues with Merton's apolitical approach. It strikes me that students are going to be more stimulated by the more science is a labor process, laboratory ethnographies, feminist epistemologies, and technological histories/controversies than paradigms, normal science, anomalies , crises and beyond.
One thing that has helped studente with Kuhn was assigning reviews that touch on different approaches to scientific revolution(s) (Hacking 1986) and the relative emphasis on paradigmatic ideas vs. technological innovations (Dyson 2003) from the New York Review of Books.

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