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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.
A paradigm shift is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline.It is a concept in the philosophy of science that was introduced and brought into the common lexicon by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn.
Kuhn's insistence that a paradigm shift was a mélange of sociology, enthusiasm and scientific promise, but not a logically determinate procedure, caused an uproar in reaction to his work. Kuhn addressed concerns in the 1969 postscript to the second edition.
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 structured scientific research trends as the progression of paradigms and paradigm shifts. [11] An example of a paradigm would be the geocentric model of the universe; an example of a paradigm shift would when the heliocentric model began taking over due to irrefutable evidence (largely from Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and ...
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Thomas Kuhn [10] described how a paradigm shift is a wholesale shift in the basic understanding of a scientific theory. Examples in science include the change of thought from miasma to germ theory as a cause of disease.
Thomas Kuhn argued that changes in scientists' views of reality not only contain subjective elements, but result from group dynamics, "revolutions" in scientific practice which result in paradigm shifts. [17] As an example, Kuhn suggested that the heliocentric "Copernican Revolution" replaced the geocentric views of Ptolemy not because of ...