Thomas Kuhn
He showed that science does not advance by accumulation but by revolution, and that insight was itself a revolution.
Kuhn was trained as a physicist and turned to the history of science. What he found disturbed him: the textbook story of continuous progress was false. Scientists in different historical periods did not merely have less information than their successors; they were working in entirely different frameworks, asking different questions, seeing different things. He called these frameworks paradigms and the transitions between them scientific revolutions. Normal science, puzzle-solving within an accepted framework, eventually accumulates anomalies that the framework cannot absorb. The result is a crisis, then a revolution, then a new normal science. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962 and became one of the most cited academic books of the 20th century. It was widely misread: Kuhn did not say science was irrational. He said it was more human than its official story admitted, and that the official story was itself a kind of normal science.
Places
Ideas
Words
“Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.”
“Paradigm changes cause scientists to see the world of their research-engagement differently.”
Works
Life & Moments
Discovery of the history of science
In 1947, as a physics graduate student at Harvard, Kuhn was asked to teach the history of science to undergraduates. Reading Aristotle's Physics for the first time, he was struck by how alien and yet internally coherent it was, a different conceptual world rather than a failed attempt at Newton's. The realization changed everything.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Published by the University of Chicago Press in 1962, the book was initially read by specialists. Over the following decade it became one of the most cited academic works of the twentieth century, introducing 'paradigm shift' and 'normal science' into common use, often in ways Kuhn himself did not endorse.
Influence
Influenced by
- Karl Popper
Popper held that science advances by attempted refutation; Kuhn replied that working scientists spend most of their time not testing their framework but using it, and that change arrives as rupture rather than steady correction.
Influenced
- Richard Rorty
Rorty took Kuhn's argument that rival paradigms lack a neutral standard of comparison as support for his own view that philosophy should give up the search for a framework standing outside every vocabulary.
