The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, is one of the most important works of our time. It has been translated into twenty five languages, and the English edition alone has sold more than one million copies. Structure established Kuhn as the century's most influential philosopher of science, but during the last twenty years of his life, Kuhn was radically rethinking the central concepts of that work. When he died in 1996, he left an unfinished sequel to Structure and a plan for a collection of essays written since 1970.

Divided into three parts, The Road since Structure is the fullest record we now have of the new direction Kuhn was taking during the last two decades of his life. The first part of the book consists of essays, philosophical rather than historical in nature, in which Kuhn refines the basic concepts set forth in Structureand#8212;paradigm shifts, incommensurability, and the nature of scientific progress. In part two, Kuhn replies at length to criticisms of his earlier work. Here the reader will find Kuhn arguing his position with some of the most significant philosophers of the time, including Paul Feyerabend and Karl Popper.

The third part of the volume is the transcript of a remarkable autobiographical interview with Kuhn conducted in Athens in 1995, not quite a year before his death. Here, the usually reticent Kuhn discusses his own intellectual developmentand#8212;his family and upbringing, his education, the influence of his training as a physicist, his war work, his relations with his colleagues, the responses to Structureand#8212;as well as his struggles to define his philosophical position both before and after that landmark work.

The Road since Structure is the definitive companion to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Forceful and accessible, it illuminates and further develops Kuhn's classic book, and it will intrigue everyone who has been engaged by Structure and the debates it launched. In it they will find the story not only of Kuhn's development but also of the man himself.

Thomas Kuhn will undoubtedly be remembered primarily for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book that introduced one of the most influential conceptions of scientific progress to emerge during the twentieth century. The Road Since Structure, assembled with Kuhn's input before his death in 1996, follows the development of his thought through the later years of his life: collected here are several essays extending and rethinking the perspectives of Structure as well as an extensive, fascinating autobiographical interview in which Kuhn discusses the course of his life and philosophy.

James Conant is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the editor of two books, Hilary Putnam: Realism with a Human Face and Hilary Putnam: Words and Life.

John Haugeland is also a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of two books, Artificial Intelligence, the Very Idea and Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, and the editor of two books, Mind Design and Mind Design II.

Foreword Jehane R. Kuhn

Editors' Introduction

PART 1: RECONCEIVING SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS

1. What Are Scientific Revolutions?

2. Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability

3. Possible Worlds in History of Science

4. The Road since Structure

5. The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science

PART 2: COMMENTS AND REPLIES

6. Reflections on My Critics

7. Theory Change as Structure Change: Comments on the Sneed Formalism

8. Metaphor in Science

9. Rationality and Theory Choice

10. The Natural and Human Sciences

11. Afterwords

PART 3: A DISCUSSION WITH THOMAS S. KUHN

Publications of Thomas S. Kuhn