The Revo‐Evo Debate in the History and Philosophy of Science

ABSTRACT The article seeks to identify some of the characteristics of the revolution‐based account of science as presented in Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions , contrasting them with their counterparts in more recent evolutionary/developmental accounts. I examine a number of considerations that guide people in maximizing or minimizing the degree of innovation they ascribe to themselves as well as others. In the first part of the article, I underline the role of language and linguistic categories, illustrating description‐sensitivity via a number of scientific and philosophical episodes. In the second, I review two philosophical debates that are relevant to the revo‐evo conundrum: the American pragmatist critique of 17th century epistemology and the 20th century controversy between relativist and realist theories of meaning. Finally, I show how the biological evo‐devo discourse figures in two recent books that advocate an evolutionary approach to the history of science. Although the general thrust of the article points in the evolutionary direction, description sensitivity recommends caution. Whether there are scientific revolutions is not only a matter of fact but also of perspective and language. Highlights The advantages of evolutionary epistemology. The dependence of our assessment of change on linguistic categories.