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In 1974, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was ranked as the second most frequently used book in political science courses focused on scope and methods. [44] 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]
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.
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]
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 ...
Thomas Kuhn's 1962 work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions emphasizes that different theoretical frameworks—such as Einstein's theory of relativity and Newton's theory of gravity, which it replaced—cannot be directly compared without meaning loss.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn wrote, "Successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science" (p. 12). Kuhn's idea was itself revolutionary in its time as it caused a major change in the way that academics talk about science.
This attitude is also reflected in his historicist approach, as outlined in Kuhn's seminal Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 2nd ed. 1970), wherein philosophical questions about scientific theories and, especially, theory change are understood in historical terms, employing concepts such as paradigm shift.
Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn's landmark work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) [11] introduced and popularized the idea of discontinuous change and the long-term effects of discontinuous change. Kuhn argued that progress in knowledge occurs at times through sudden jumps, which he called paradigm shifts.