I don’t have time to re-read the whole book to come up with examples, and there is unhelpfully no index in my copy, but checking through the footnotes quickly, I found exactly two references to actual positivists (or close enough); a quick dismissive paragraph on Ernest Nagel’s use of probability theory, and a passing reference to Philipp Frank’s biography of Einstein. No references to Reichenbach or Hempel or Carnap. The closest he comes is perhaps the (one) reference to Goodman, who was heavily influenced by Carnap, but Kuhn cites Goodman favorably, while apparently being unaware of how positivist-influenced the ideas he was agreeing with were. There’s also a citation of Wittgenstein, which seems vaguely favorable but complains about Wittgenstein’s lack of development of an idea, which is surely fair enough; I won’t mark anyone down for complaining about that problem in Wittgenstein. But I do have to give low marks for talking so much about “the positivist” while citing only one major positivist philosopher of science (Ernest Nagel) and attributing many views to “the positivist” which are far more simplistic than that positivist would ever have endorsed. Also no references to Duhem. Quine doesn’t get mentioned until the postscript, although it’s quite plausible that the enthusiasm for Kuhn at the time was part of the same broader phenomenon that turned Quine and Putnam and Goodman into huge stars in philosophy around the same time (all three of those were also to varying degrees prone to denial about the extent of their influence from positivism, but at least they were generally better about citing actual positivists when criticizing them).
Maybe he’s referring to Comte or Mach? But I saw no references to them at all, and criticizing 19th century figures in 1962 doesn’t sound very revolutionary. The most charitable I can be is that there may have been some confused historians of science employing some positivist ideas without understanding them (I don’t know much about history of science in Kuhn’s time), and Kuhn’s “positivist” may be an assembly of such characters. But that’s just speculation. It still seems to me that Kuhn is part of the depressing philosophical tradition of ignoring and misrepresenting previous philosophers in order to appear more original and insightful.
Which is not to say that the book is worthless. I do find the idea of a paradigm very fruitful, and it seems a lot of scientific progress involves the discovery of new ways of making observations, and these are issues that perhaps hadn’t gotten sufficient emphasis prior to Kuhn. But a lot of the radical claims that he is most famous for are either not as radical or original as he claimed, or not as well supported by his examples as his very slick writing might lead one to believe, or both.
I don’t have time to re-read the whole book to come up with examples, and there is unhelpfully no index in my copy, but checking through the footnotes quickly, I found exactly two references to actual positivists (or close enough); a quick dismissive paragraph on Ernest Nagel’s use of probability theory, and a passing reference to Philipp Frank’s biography of Einstein. No references to Reichenbach or Hempel or Carnap. The closest he comes is perhaps the (one) reference to Goodman, who was heavily influenced by Carnap, but Kuhn cites Goodman favorably, while apparently being unaware of how positivist-influenced the ideas he was agreeing with were. There’s also a citation of Wittgenstein, which seems vaguely favorable but complains about Wittgenstein’s lack of development of an idea, which is surely fair enough; I won’t mark anyone down for complaining about that problem in Wittgenstein. But I do have to give low marks for talking so much about “the positivist” while citing only one major positivist philosopher of science (Ernest Nagel) and attributing many views to “the positivist” which are far more simplistic than that positivist would ever have endorsed. Also no references to Duhem. Quine doesn’t get mentioned until the postscript, although it’s quite plausible that the enthusiasm for Kuhn at the time was part of the same broader phenomenon that turned Quine and Putnam and Goodman into huge stars in philosophy around the same time (all three of those were also to varying degrees prone to denial about the extent of their influence from positivism, but at least they were generally better about citing actual positivists when criticizing them).
Maybe he’s referring to Comte or Mach? But I saw no references to them at all, and criticizing 19th century figures in 1962 doesn’t sound very revolutionary. The most charitable I can be is that there may have been some confused historians of science employing some positivist ideas without understanding them (I don’t know much about history of science in Kuhn’s time), and Kuhn’s “positivist” may be an assembly of such characters. But that’s just speculation. It still seems to me that Kuhn is part of the depressing philosophical tradition of ignoring and misrepresenting previous philosophers in order to appear more original and insightful.
Which is not to say that the book is worthless. I do find the idea of a paradigm very fruitful, and it seems a lot of scientific progress involves the discovery of new ways of making observations, and these are issues that perhaps hadn’t gotten sufficient emphasis prior to Kuhn. But a lot of the radical claims that he is most famous for are either not as radical or original as he claimed, or not as well supported by his examples as his very slick writing might lead one to believe, or both.