Open Journal of Philosophy 2013. Vol.3, No.2, 351-357 Published Online May 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojpp) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojpp.2013.32053 Scientific Prediction in the Beginning of the “Historical Turn”: Stephen Toulmin and Thomas Kuhn Wenceslao J. Gonzalez Department of Humanities, University of A Coruña, Spain Email:
[email protected] Received January 14th, 2013; revised February 17th, 2013; accepted March 2nd, 2013 Copyright © 2013 Wenceslao J. Gonzalez. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Com- mons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, pro- vided the original work is properly cited. This paper considers the similarities and differences between Toulmin and Kuhn on the problem of pre- diction. The context of the analysis is the beginning of the “historical turn” in philosophy of science (i.e., the period before the 1965 international colloquium held at Bedford College). The comparison between these authors takes into account several levels: semantic, logical, epistemological, methodological, onto- logical, and axiological. The main goal is to analyze whether there are influences of Toulmin in Kuhn re- garding scientific prediction or, at least, if the former reached similar positions to the latter on the issue of the role of prediction in science. Keywords: Toulmin; Kuhn; Scientific Prediction; Historical Turn; Similarities; Differences Historical Context the role of prediction as a guarantee of the validity of scientific knowledge. (v) Ontologically, they see science as a human The “historical turn” in the philosophy and methodology of activity rather than as an abstract amount of impersonal science is commonly attributed to Thomas Kuhn and Imre La- knowledge.