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Thomas Samuel Kuhn (/ k uː n /; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.
In particular, Kuhn's theory has been used by political scientists to critique behavioralism, which claims that accurate political statements must be both testable and falsifiable. [45] The book also proved popular with political scientists embroiled in debates about whether a set of formulations put forth by a political scientist constituted a ...
Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) was born into a world of technological and scientific advancement. Working as a historian and philosopher of science at MIT, Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, proposing a theory for classifying generational knowledge under frameworks known as paradigms. [2]
However, Kuhn would not recognise such a paradigm shift. In the social sciences, people can still use earlier ideas to discuss the history of science. Philosophers and historians of science, including Kuhn himself, ultimately accepted a modified version of Kuhn's model, which synthesizes his original view with the gradualist model that preceded it.
Kuhn stressed that historically, the route to normal science could be a difficult one. Prior to the formation of a shared paradigm or research consensus, would-be scientists were reduced to the accumulation of random facts and unverified observations, in the manner recorded by Pliny the Elder or Francis Bacon, [4] while simultaneously beginning the foundations of their field from scratch ...
In the philosophy of science, observations are said to be "theory-laden" when they are affected by the theoretical presuppositions held by the investigator. The thesis of theory-ladenness is most strongly associated with the late 1950s and early 1960s work of Norwood Russell Hanson, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend, and was probably first put forth (at least implicitly) by Pierre Duhem about ...
For Kuhn, the choice of paradigm was sustained by rational processes, but not ultimately determined by them. The choice between paradigms involves setting two or more "portraits" against the world and deciding which likeness is most promising. For Kuhn, acceptance or rejection of a paradigm is a social process as much as a logical process.
Kuhn would later develop his theory regarding the development of science in his later work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” [6] which was originally published in 1962 and remains his best known work. In this work, he focuses on a one particular example; namely the Copernican Revolution, which is a paradigmatic example of such a ...