P14: i:"a sufficient basis... on which I shall be drawing"
I don't think Kuhn means anything particularly foundational by the word "basis." This is idiomatic, like "you get the basic idea." He's saying that these three examples will give you an idea of where he's starting from and where he will be going in the future with his ideas, some of which he'll be drawing upon later in the piece, "drawing" as in "pulling out from" rather than "copying from."
One word that I paid no attention to on this page and the last is "clues": "clues to a central aspect of scientific knowledge," a vague phrase but evocative, implying a mystery that needs to be figured out and maybe some sense of his not having solved the case yet.
What I myself jotted down was "first by describing three examples of revolutionary change and then briefly discussing three characteristics which they all share. Doubtless revolutionary changes share other characteristics as well..."
So, from these three examples we'll be able to recognize other examples of revolutionary change in science, and these examples have similarities, three of which he's going to point out to us (which will help us recognize other revolutions when we see them and will also tell us something about a "central aspect of scientific knowledge," presumably).
ii: "normal change is... the sort that results in growth, accretion, cumulative addition to what was known before"
Yeah, as opposed to subtraction and elimination and dissolution. I wrote this down too, following up with, "Boyle's law will illustrate what is involved: its discoverers had previously possessed the concepts of gas pressure and volume as well as the instruments required to determine their magnitudes. The discovery that, for a given gas sample, the product of pressure and volume was a constant at constant temperature simply added to the knowledge of the way these antecedently understood variables behave." So, nothing of what was previously understood was tossed away. Key word: "concepts," and now an idea is being delivered. If the concepts remain the same, nothing is lost or shredded. And if the concepts change?... Well, just what does that mean, "concepts change"? That's something the essay tries to answer at the end, I think.
Taking Mark's inventory 2
i:"a sufficient basis... on which I shall be drawing"
I don't think Kuhn means anything particularly foundational by the word "basis." This is idiomatic, like "you get the basic idea." He's saying that these three examples will give you an idea of where he's starting from and where he will be going in the future with his ideas, some of which he'll be drawing upon later in the piece, "drawing" as in "pulling out from" rather than "copying from."
One word that I paid no attention to on this page and the last is "clues": "clues to a central aspect of scientific knowledge," a vague phrase but evocative, implying a mystery that needs to be figured out and maybe some sense of his not having solved the case yet.
What I myself jotted down was "first by describing three examples of revolutionary change and then briefly discussing three characteristics which they all share. Doubtless revolutionary changes share other characteristics as well..."
So, from these three examples we'll be able to recognize other examples of revolutionary change in science, and these examples have similarities, three of which he's going to point out to us (which will help us recognize other revolutions when we see them and will also tell us something about a "central aspect of scientific knowledge," presumably).
ii: "normal change is... the sort that results in growth, accretion, cumulative addition to what was known before"
Yeah, as opposed to subtraction and elimination and dissolution. I wrote this down too, following up with, "Boyle's law will illustrate what is involved: its discoverers had previously possessed the concepts of gas pressure and volume as well as the instruments required to determine their magnitudes. The discovery that, for a given gas sample, the product of pressure and volume was a constant at constant temperature simply added to the knowledge of the way these antecedently understood variables behave." So, nothing of what was previously understood was tossed away. Key word: "concepts," and now an idea is being delivered. If the concepts remain the same, nothing is lost or shredded. And if the concepts change?... Well, just what does that mean, "concepts change"? That's something the essay tries to answer at the end, I think.