However, it seems quite definitionally impossible to derive a proposition from a set of premises, i.e., to say something in the analytic philosophical sense, without having a normative framework which establishes the procedures for doing so, a fact which the reception and impact of Kuhn’s work seems to validate. Insofar as some version of formal logic is true, one can only be so “meta” while saying something with meaning.

Amusingly, none of these references is strictly correct; all of these books have longer titles which, due to their popularity, have been reduced in the vernacular to a single word, in much the same way that famous entertainers become “mononymous persons” (vide Wikipedia).

Kuhn’s thesis is a nice narrative, mostly consistent with a non-continental lightweight version of Marxism, and the right book at the right time. It has given ammunition to plenty of forgettable scientists to cast themselves as non-normal scientists (Gleick’s “Chaos”, anyone?). And in Economics, I am sure that post-autistics economists and econophysicists have absorbed its lesson, maybe through hearsay.

But ultimately it is unfalsifiable and predicts nothing, and by construction has nothing normative to say. As a work of historical scholarship it relies too much on secondary sources. Worse still, it has help spawn sociologists of science like Bruno Latour. Need I say more?

I know this comment is venomous, but a reader approaching Kuhn’s for the first time may receive a mistaken impression.