Note: These are the notes that I used for the second half of the Kuhn material.

Kuhn,

How do we find out new things? Discovery.

Ex The ‘discovery’ of Oxygen

Priestly

1774 Heat red oxide of mercury and then collect what rises off of it.

Called it nitrous oxide

1775 Then he figured out that you could breath it and then he called it air without a lot of phlogiston.

Lavoisier

1775 the gas that Priestly found was very pure air.

1777 This gas was a distinct kind of thing and that it was one of two parts of air.

There is no answer to the question “When was Oxygen discovered?”

This is because of the nature of discovery.

We shouldn’t even ask the question because dis. ought not to have such a central role when we are talking about science.

People who say that Priestly discovered Oxygen say this because he was the first person to isolate it.

But he didn’t have a pure sample and he didn’t know what he had:

• First he thought that it was nitrous oxide
• Then he thought it was dephlotisticated air

1774 Lavoisier thought that Oxygen was air.

1777 he found out that Oxygen was a part of air, but he still didn’t really know everything about Oxygen.

Discovery is not a single act like seeing is.

“Any attempt to date the discovery [of oxygen] must inevitably be arbitrary because discovering a new sort of phenomenon is necessarily a complex event, one which involves recognizing both that something is and what it is.” p101

• observations and conceptualization are linked
• fact and theory are linked
• discovery is a process and it must take time.

We need to link the idea of discovery to the idea of paradigm shift

• characteristics of the discovery of new kinds of phenomena
• previous awareness of anomaly
• the gradual emergence of conceptual and observations recognition
• change of paradigm categories

“novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation” 103