Varieties of Scientific Revolution: William James's and Thomas Kuhn's Epistemologies and Some Implications for Educational Research

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: Empirically Engaged Philosophy of Education: Examining the Relationships Between Philosophy and Educational Research

Abstract

William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1958) is typically cordoned off from his epistemological work. This inquiry includes Varieties in consideration of James’s epistemology in order to thicken his overall conception of knowing and to be in tune with his more general philosophical pluralism. This reconstruction of James’s epistemology is then brought to bear on the work of Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn develops a version of scientific epistemology that possesses two distinct ways of knowing that, I argue, have much in common with my reconstructed Jamesian epistemology. This study then uses James’s epistemology to critique Kuhn’s work and concludes with consideration of what this comparison has to offer contemporary critiques of educational research.

Author

• Kurt Stemhagen, Virginia Commonwealth University