Are We Playing the Glass Bead Game? On the Self-integrity of the Paradigm Idea

Abstract

Both in domestic and foreign literature on the philosophy of science, refer­ences to the works of Thomas Kuhn are quite common, as well as to his other postpositivist contemporaries – I. Lakatos, St. Toulmin, N.R. Hanson, P. Feyer­abend and others. However, at the same time, the conceptual content of their ideas and the methodologically significant details of their models of knowl­edge dynamics are applied more than rarely and very selectively. The concep­tual potential of postpositivism is used today mainly in the general explanatory background discourse about science: cognitive activity is socially conditioned, while science is historically changeable both in the forms of its organization and in its results. As for the actual Kuhnian model of the dynamics of science, the Lakatosian program for the development of science, and other postposi­tivist constructions, their conceptual content is resorted to rather in the context of general reasoning about the contours of scientific knowledge rather than as an epistemologically significant creative component of the philosophical and methodological understanding of modern scientific practices. The article at­tempts to show that the circumstance noted above indicates not so much that the views of postpositivists now belong to an honorable past, but not directly related to the development of modern problems, but how much about distanc­ing the modern philosophy of science from the real methodological problems that modern science needs to solve.