Will I love The Essential Tension?

Once I finished reading Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it wasn’t long before I learned that he had followed it up with a collection of deeper analyses in the realm of the philosophy of science.

His sequel book took me deeper into the minds and conflicts of noted greats of science whose scientific contributions’ acceptance is now taken for granted by most. Yet, in their own day, they, too, often had to contend with the tension of science’s and scientists’ history of preferring what consensus had ordained as settled knowledge instead of welcoming new insights and discoveries.

The book is much better than his famous but often misread The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, because it gets down to detailed cases in physics, in which Kuhn was trained. Though he never accepted the term, it amounts to a “rhetoric” of physics, that is, a study of, in Aristotle’s definition, the available means of persuasion in a science or a court of law.