Stephen Yearwood
1 min readMar 28, 2022

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The problem, as I see it, is that people have extrapolated too much from Kuhn's thesis. His critique refers to "science" as an institutional construct. Even at that, it mostly applies to theoretical physics, which is where science operates at a level that attempts to explain the fundamental nature of all of material existence.

Geology, for example, had something like a Kuhnian revolution with plate tectonics, but that theory doesn't rise to the level that, say, relativity or quantum mechanics do. Even within geology, while it involved that science at its largest scale, it did not entail all geological processes and their observable products: how, for example, diamonds get made was unaffected by the emergence of that theory--which, by the way, was the product of and was verified by observation within material existence.

It is all the more incredible, then, to appeal to Kuhn's thesis to deem all observational knowledge to be as subjective as, say, believing in God is or what the standard of beauty is, much less to be of ultimately questionable validity, as some seem to think Kuhn's analysis establishes. I agree with the postmodernist perspective, which has been greatly influenced by Kuhn's thesis, that no human being can ever escape all subjective influences, but particular observations within material existence can still be absolutely valid: for instance, the observation that human beings have no choice but to effect choices.

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Stephen Yearwood
Stephen Yearwood

Written by Stephen Yearwood

M.A. in political economy (money/distributive justice) "Please don't confront me with my failures/ I'm aware of them" from "These Days," as sung by Gregg Allman

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