Question

What according to the writer did his experience as on ev
erster teach him

Answer 1

uring the last three decades faith in objective scientific knowledge, a faith that

formerly served as the unquestioned basis for most of the teaching in schools

and academia, has been disrupted by unsettling movements in the very discipline of

philosophy of science. Though the roots of the subversion go back a good deal further,

the trouble was brought to the awareness of a wider public by the publication of

Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. There, undisguised and for everyone

to read, was the explicit statement that

… research in parts of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and even art

history, all converge to suggest that the traditional epistemological

paradigm is somehow askew. That failure to fit is also made increasingly

apparent by the historical study of science… None of these crisis-promoting

subjects has yet produced a viable alternate to the traditional

epistemological paradigm, but they do begin to suggest what some of that

paradigm’s characteristics will be. (Kuhn, 1970, p.121)

While the troubles of the “traditional epistemological paradigm” have shown no

sign of subsiding in the years since Kuhn’s publication, one could not honestly say that

any substitute has been generally accepted. In most Departments of Psychology and

Schools of Education, teaching continues as though nothing had happened and the

quest for immutable objective Truths were as promising as ever. For some of us,

however, a different view of knowledge has emerged, not as a new invention but rather

as the result of pursuing suggestions made by much earlier dissidents. This view

differs from the old one in that it deliberately discards the notion that knowledge

could or should be a representation of an observer-independent world-in-itself and

replaces it with the demand that the conceptual constructs we call knowledge be viable

in the experiential world of the knowing subject.

Ludwig Fleck, whose monograph of 1935 Kuhn acknowledged as a forerunner,

wrote an earlier article in 1929 that went virtually unnoticed and that already

contained much that presages what the Young Turks have been proposing in recent

years: