Desarollo científico y cambio de léxico. Conferencias Thalheimer 1984.

Abstract

In 1984 Thomas Kuhn delivered the Thalheimer lectures in the Philosophy Department at Johns Hopkins University. Between November 12 and 19, Kuhn gave four lectures jointly entitled “Scientific development and lexical change.” The lectures focus on the rising historically-oriented philosophy of science and the strategies the historian must implement to understand early scientific theories. Kuhn also develops the notion of a lexicon, claiming that the language of scientific theories is constitutive of the scientists’ world. Thus, a change in lexicon implies a change in the world the scientific community conceives as being describable through language. Because of lexical changes, the historian must reconstruct past theories by using the language of those theories, regardless of whether such language is currently accepted. The draft of the lectures remained unpublished and untranslated in any language for more than three decades. In this volume, these drafts are available for the first time in a critical edition in Spanish.