重探孔恩科學變遷理論：從科學共同體到工作群組

Rethinking Kuhn's Theory of Scientific Changes: From Scientific Communities to Working Groups

本文旨在回應陳瑞麟對孔恩典範概念所提出的三個挑戰：（ 1）舊有典範的精煉與革命理論之間沒有明確的區分；（2）以典範表徵科學史上的特定學派是有所困難的；（ 3）孔恩的認知價值理論無法提供科學家就新典範形成共識的合理因果說明。為了應對這些挑戰，我檢視了孔恩科哲的新近發展。Brad Wray運用後期孔恩詞彙結構的概念去理解和表徵科學革命，Darrell Rowbottom則提出了局部化典範，以說明科學是如何片段變遷的。然而，我認為這兩種發展都不足以完全克服陳瑞麟的所有挑戰。繼而，我提出了一種分析個體科學家在「工作群組」中異與同的方法，並通過考察狹義相對論誕生前後歷史中的這些工作群組來闡明這個概念。這樣的方法是個從下而上的策略，在特定的脈絡下重構科學家之間的異與同。

This paper is a response to Chen Ruey-Lin’ s three challenges to Kuhn’ s concept of paradigm: (1) There is no clear distinction between articulations of an old paradigm and a revolutionary theory. (2) Using a paradigm to represent a particular school in science history is difficult. (3) Kuhn’ s view of epistemic values cannot offer a reasonable causal account of scientists’ consensus on a new paradigm. In order to resolve these challenges, I examine recent developments in Kuhnian philosophy of science. Brad Wray uses Kuhn’ s later concept of lexicon to represent and understand scientific revolutions, while Darrell Rowbottom proposes partial paradigms to explain how science changes in a piecemeal way. However, I argue that both developments are insufficient to overcome all of Chen’ s challenges. Therefore, I propose an approach for analyzing individual scientists’ similarities and differences in “ working groups” and I illustrate this concept by examining such working groups in the history before and after the birth of special relativity. This approach is a bottom-up strategy, reconstructing the similarities and differences among scientists in a particular context.