Kuhn cannot take seriously that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature.” Does this mean that he does not take truth seriously? Not at all. […]
Kuhn did reject a simple correspondence theory” which says true statements correspond to facts about the world. […]
In the wave of skepticism that swept American scholarship at the end of the twentieth century, many influential intellectuals took Kuhn as an ally in their denials of truth as a virtue. I mean the thinkers of the sort that cannot write down or utter the word true except by literally or figuratively putting quotation marks around it—to indicate how they shudder at the very thought of so harmful a notion. Many reflective scientists, who admire much of what Kuhn says about the sciences, believe he encouraged deniers.
It is true that Structure gave enormous impetus to sociological studies of science. Some of that work, with its emphasis on the idea that facts are socially constructed” and apparent participation in the denial of truth,” is exactly what conservative scientists protest against. Kuhn made plain that he himself detested that development of his work…
Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest an hypothesis that can subsequently be tested, but adventure is prior to theory.
When land and its tillage are the basis of taxation, one need not care exactly how many people there are.