Philosophy

Thomas Kuhn

1922–1996 · American

Philosophy and history of science

Thomas Samuel Kuhn was a physicist turned historian of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is among the most influential and most quoted academic works of the twentieth century. Against the picture of science as steady accumulation, Kuhn described long periods of "normal science" solving puzzles inside an agreed framework, broken by crises in which the whole framework is replaced. He gave ordinary English the phrase "paradigm shift" — and spent much of his later life objecting to what people did with it.

How to spot them

▸Paradigm, normal science, anomaly, crisis, revolution, incommensurability
▸'Paradigm shift' — his coinage, and his regret
▸The 1962 book that appeared, oddly, as an instalment of a logical-positivist encyclopedia
▸His running argument with Karl Popper about falsification and about whether normal science is a good thing
▸Trained as a physicist at Harvard; converted to history of science by reading Aristotle's Physics

Key works

A 1962 monograph, published inside an encyclopedia of unified science, dividing the sciences into long stretches of puzzle-solving broken by crisis and upheaval (1962)

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — it has sold well over a million copies and gave the world 'paradigm shift'.

A 1957 first book on the astronomical upheaval that moved the Earth out of the centre, grown out of a Harvard general-education course for non-scientists (1957)

The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought.

A 1977 collection of essays named for the pull a researcher feels between conserving a tradition and breaking it (1977)

The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change.

A 1978 history arguing, to the annoyance of physicists, that the man credited with quantising energy in 1900 did not at first think he had done anything of the kind (1978)

Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912 — on Max Planck.

A posthumous 2000 collection of late essays and a long autobiographical interview given in Athens shortly before his death (2000)

The Road Since Structure.

Key ideas

A paradigm is both a set of shared commitments and, more narrowly, an exemplary problem-solution that trainees learn to imitate
Normal science is puzzle-solving: scientists do not try to refute the paradigm, they assume it and mop up
Anomalies accumulate until a crisis makes the framework itself questionable, and a revolution replaces it
Incommensurability: rival paradigms cannot be fully translated into each other, so there is no neutral language in which to compare them point by point
After a revolution scientists 'work in a different world' — the gestalt-switch metaphor of the duck-rabbit
Science textbooks rewrite the past, making the history look like an orderly march towards the present
Kuhn loss: a new paradigm may explain things the old one could not, while quietly losing problems the old one had solved

Quick-fire facts

•Took his PhD in physics at Harvard in 1949 before turning to the history of science
•His conversion came while preparing a course: reading Aristotle's Physics and realising it was not bad mechanics but a coherent system with different questions
•The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962 as a volume of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, the logical positivists' own project
•He clashed with Karl Popper at a London colloquium in 1965; the proceedings appeared as Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge
•Margaret Masterman counted twenty-one distinct senses of 'paradigm' in the book; Kuhn added a postscript in 1969 trying to sort them out
•Taught at Harvard, Berkeley and Princeton before becoming Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT
•Won the History of Science Society's George Sarton Medal in 1982
•He is said to have thrown an ashtray at the young Errol Morris, later the documentary film-maker, during a dispute at Princeton
•Died of cancer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1996

Drill it — 8 cards

1 / 8new card

Sources

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Thomas Kuhn
Thomas S. Kuhn — The Structure of Scientific Revolutions