Kuhn and the Contemporary Realism/Antirealism Debates

Thomas Kuhn was never a key player in the contemporary realism/antirealism debates, the debates that gained momentum around 1980 or so, with the publication of Bas van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image and Larry Laudan’s “A Confutation of Convergent Realism.” But I argue that Kuhn had a significant influence on these debates. Kuhn played a significant role in focusing philosophers’ attention on a different issue than the realism/antirealism debates of the 1950s and 1960s. Instead of focusing on the meaning of theoretical terms, philosophers of science turned their attention to the problems raised by changes of theory. The particular shape of the contemporary debates thus owes something to the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.