Kuhn’s Development Before and After Structure

Abstract

This chapter deals with Kuhn’s development immediately before Structure and during the last two decades of his life. I discuss Kuhn’s development from his penultimate draft of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to its final version. Here, I examine the notable absence of Wittgenstein’s influence and the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification in the penultimate draft. Next, I turn to his unfinished book manuscript entitled The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development. I explore Kuhn’s developing theory of kind terms and how this theory becomes valuable in understanding Kuhn’s views of incommensurability, taxonomies, lexicons, revolutionary science, and reality.