Thomas Kuhn's ""Linguistic Turn"" and the Legacy of Logical Empiricism (Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy)

Description

This stupid book embodies the doctrinal idiocy of modern analytic philosophy of science. The book appears to be essentially Gattei's PhD thesis (indeed, it consists almost entirely of highly unimaginative, dissertation-style literature review); and, since Gattei is obviously intellectually spineless, the book reveals the doctrinal imprint in its purest form. The book's stupid thesis is that "the implicit presuppositions and the stated principles of Kuhn's philosophy are not very different from those of the logical positivists or logical empiricists he was determined to reject" (p. x). The notion that Kuhn was "determined to reject" logical positivism is of course utterly ridiculous. Two assumptions make such nonsense appear sensible to people like Gattei and Alexander Bird (his PhD advisor, who has written on the same topic). Firstly, that logical positivism is the alpha and the omega of philosophy of science, and that everyone must be "determined" to define his opinion in relation to it. Secondly, that the philosophy of science is a pathetic ping-pong game between philosophical isms. Because of these doctrinal assumptions, it never occurs to these people that someone might actually do philosophy of science by thinking about actual science and pursuing the interesting questions that arise, rather than by rummaging through the hottest post-positivist journals in search of some miniscule crevice that no one has exploited yet.