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7992	dbpedia	2	82	https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/contents-creativity/2222-volume-4-1-2021/4056-thomas-kuhn-and-the-cognitive-matrix-the-thousand-faces-of-science-and-art	en	Thomas Kuhn and the cognitive matrix: the thousand faces of science and art			[ "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/templates/jsn_gruve_free/images/logo.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/chunk1.jpg", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/1-linguistic-n-63-90.jpg", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/linie.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/2-review100-n-63-90.jpg", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/linie.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/3-analysis-n-63-90.jpg", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/linie.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/4-management-n-63-90.jpg", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/linie.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/5-conteporary-reading-n-63-90.jpg", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/linie.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/6-geopolitics-n-63-90.jpg", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/linie.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/7-gender-n-63-90.jpg", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/linie.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/8-knowledge_c-n-63-90.jpg", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/linie.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/9-journal%20of%20self-governance%20and%20management%20economics-page-001-n-63-90.jpg", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/linie.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/10-cover%20aje-n-63-90.jpg", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/linie.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/11-Romanian%20Journal%20of%20Artistic%20Creativity.jpg", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/linie.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/cover%20PIHRM-mic.jpg", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/linie.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/12-cover-AJMR.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/linie.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/creativity.jpg", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/linie.png", "https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/images/stories/smart-governance.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "Addleton Academic Publishers" ]	null	[ "MIHAI A. STROE" ]	null	Addleton Academic Publishers	en			null	ABSTRACT. Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), one of the most popular philosophers of science of the 20th century, has been celebrated as the founder of science studies (Ian Hacking), but it has also been pointed out that his seminal book entitled The structure of scientific revolutions (1962) embraced and engendered what Frederick Crews called “theoreticism” (Ken Wilber). The following review essay on Kuhn’s notion of paradigm, with focus on scientific revolutions, the literature-and-science movement and associated matters like Herbert Dingle’s refutation of the special theory of relativity (which to date has been almost totally ignored by the scientific community), tries to clarify why Chicago University Press had in their hands in 1962 indeed a “bombshell” (as Ian Hacking called Kuhn’s 1962 book) that was to create one of the greatest creative-destructive intellectual tsunamis to date. At stake was the reputation of the Western empirical science of the past four hundred years. What Kuhn did was to show that empirical science had also a social aspect, which was fully integrated with the empirical one, together structuring the scientific “paradigms,” i.e. the engines of science. In this context, it became clear that all creative activities possessed “paradigms” as vital engines to push them forward. From Kuhn’s idea of paradigm sprang an endless torrent of misreadings and misinterpretations that remind us of “misprision,” the process Harold Bloom talked about later in The anxiety of influence (1973), when “theoreticism” had already taken root, threatening no less than to effect the fall of science. Why? The answer is simple: once science was shown to have an extra non-empirical facet – the social facet (which theoreticism took to be the only facet science actually has), who could say that there existed not also other hidden aspects? Who could say that the social facet is not so composite as to make science look more like myth, which had been shown by Campbell in 1949 to talk about a mythical hero with a thousand faces? What if science, like myth and art, had also a thousand faces? Ken Wilber showed that the situation is even more complicated than what Kuhn presented in 1962 (Kuhn’s Janus Bifrons becomes a Janus Quadrifrons). However, we will show that Kuhn missed two elements of reality which are fundamental – he missed optical illusions like the Ebbinghaus illusion and, even more importantly, he missed the case of the people with sense-organ impairment like the blind from birth. Kuhn emphasized that perceptions are connected with education and all prior experience (“nurture”); people with sense-organ impairment from birth and illusions like the optical Ebbinghaus illusion, conversely, show that perception has also a purely empirical face. The consequences are the following: 1) Nature for humans is [Nature] and [Nature + Nurture]. 2) For humans [Nurture] without [Nature] has no power. This understanding restores the empirical facet of science to its proper traditional place, even if science shows itself to be, in the wake of Kuhn’s 1962 revolutionary book, like a living tree with a thousand faces. Keywords: community; paradigm shift; disciplinary matrix; scienteme; anomaly; cognitive gestalt switch; incommensurability; (non-)cumulativeness; crisis; puzzle-solving; regressive progression; progressive regression; theoreticism; Ebbinghaus effect; sense-organ impairment from birth; (non-)correlativity; Janus Stroe MA (2021) Thomas Kuhn and the cognitive matrix: the thousand faces of science and art. Creativity 4(1): 391–514. doi:10.22381/C4120217
7992	dbpedia	2	16	https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn	en	Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia	https://simple.wikipedia.org/static/favicon/wikipedia.ico	https://simple.wikipedia.org/static/favicon/wikipedia.ico	[ "https://simple.wikipedia.org/static/images/icons/wikipedia.png", "https://simple.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-wordmark-en.svg", "https://simple.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-tagline-simple.svg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg/10px-OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a4/Flag_of_the_United_States.svg/30px-Flag_of_the_United_States.svg.png", "https://login.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAutoLogin/start?type=1x1", "https://simple.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/wikimedia-button.svg", "https://simple.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/poweredby_mediawiki.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Contributors to Wikimedia projects" ]	2013-06-19T07:15:26+00:00		en	/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png		https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn	Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 - 17 June, 1996) was a Jewish-American physicist, and historian and philosopher of science. He introduced the idea of paradigm shift. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and died from lung cancer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged 73. Incommensurability
7992	dbpedia	1	14	https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn	en	Thomas Samuel Kuhn	https://www.newworldency…avicon-32x32.png	https://www.newworldency…avicon-32x32.png	[ "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/images/nwe_header.jpg", "https://static.newworldencyclopedia.org/skins/common/images/Cc.logo.circle.png", "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/resources/assets/poweredby_mediawiki_88x31.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	https://static.newworldencyclopedia.org/favicon.ico		https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn	Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions and innovations in the philosophy of science. More than a million copies of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, were printed, and it became the most studied and discussed text in philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had far reaching impacts on diverse fields of study beyond the philosophy of science, particularly on social sciences. Key concepts Kuhn presented in this work, such as "paradigm" and "incommensurability," became popular beyond academics. Life Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and his wife Minette Stroock Kuhn. The family was Jewish on both sides, although they were non-practicing. His father had been trained as a hydraulic engineer and had gone to Harvard. When he was six months old, the family moved to New York City, and the young Kuhn attended progressive schools there, and later in the upstate New York area. Kuhn entered Harvard University in 1940 and obtained his bachelor's degree in physics after three years in 1943, his master's in 1946 and Ph.D. in 1949. While there, primarily because of his editorship of the Harvard Crimson, he came to the attention of then Harvard president James Bryant Conant, and eventually gained Conant's sponsorship for becoming a Harvard Fellow. Conant would also be extremely influential in Kuhn’s career, encouraging him to write the book that would become The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first ed. published in 1962). After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California at Berkeley in both the philosophy and the history departments, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. Kuhn had entered Harvard as a physics major, intending to study theoretical physics. He did go on to get his degrees in physics. But as an undergraduate he took a course in philosophy and, although this was completely new to him, he was fascinated with it. He especially took to Kant. Later he would say that his own position was Kantian, but with movable categories. Sometime around 1947 Kuhn began teaching what had before been Conant’s course, “Understanding Science.” This course could be thought of as an elementary course in the history and philosophy of science. This led Kuhn to begin focusing on the history of science. He also had his “Eureka moment”—maybe better called an “Aristotle moment”—in the summer of 1947. As a 1991 article in Scientific American put it, Kuhn “was working toward his doctorate in physics at Harvard …when he was asked to teach some science to undergraduate humanities majors. Searching for a simple case history that could illuminate the roots of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle's Physics and was astonished at how ‘wrong’ it was [when understood in Newtonian terms]… Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the window of his dormitory room… when suddenly Aristotle ‘made sense.’” Concerning what he found in Aristotle, Kuhn wrote, “How could [Aristotle’s] characteristic talents have deserted his so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had so deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? Those questions troubled me. I could easily believe that Aristotle had stumbled, but not that, on entering physics, he had totally collapsed. Might not the fault be mine, rather than Aristotle’s, I asked myself. Perhaps his words had not always meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine” (The Road Since Structure, 16). Kuhn reported that, in his window-gazing, “Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together.” As the Scientific American article put it, “Kuhn … realized that Aristotle's views of such basic concepts as motion and matter were totally unlike Newton's… Understood on its own terms, Aristotle's Physics ‘wasn't just bad Newton,’ Kuhn says; it was just different.” This insight would go on to underlie most of his subsequent work in history and philosophy of science. Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, and in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science. He was also awarded numerous honorary doctorates. Kuhn suffered cancer of the bronchial tubes for the last two years of his life and died Monday, June 17, 1996. He was survived by his wife Jehane R. Kuhn, his ex-wife Kathryn Muhs Kuhn, and their three children, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Nathaniel. The Copernican Revolution (1957) In his lifetime, Kuhn published more than a hundred papers and reviews, as well as five books (the fifth published posthumously). His first book—he had already published a few papers and reviews in various journals—was The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Harvard University Press, 1957), with a forward by Conant. This book began out of lectures he had given to the students at Harvard, and was completed after he went to Berkeley. It may be seen as a prolegomena to his later and most important, and far more influential, book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in that in Copernican Revolution Kuhn introduced a number of the points that would be further developed in the later book. Kuhn emphasized that the Copernican Revolution “event was plural. Its core was a transformation of mathematical astronomy, but it embraced conceptual changes in cosmology, physics, philosophy, and religion as well.” The Copernican revolution, Kuhn clamed, shows “how and with what effect the concepts of many different fields are woven into a single fabric of thought.” And “…filiations between distinct fields of thought appear in the period after the publication of Copernicus’ work. …[This work] could only be assimilated by men able to create a new physics, a new conception of space, and a new idea of man’s relation to God. …Specialized accounts [of the Copernican Revolution] are inhibited both by aim and method from examining the nature of these ties and their effects upon the growth of human knowledge.” Kuhn claimed that this effort to show the Copernican Revolution’s plurality is “probably the book’s most important novelty.” But also it is novel in that it “repeatedly violates the institutional boundaries which separate the audience for ‘science’ from the audience for ‘history’ or ‘philosophy.’ Occasionally it may seem to be two books, one dealing with science, the other with intellectual history.” The seven chapters of Copernican Revolution deal with what Kuhn called “The Ancient Two-Sphere Universe,” “The Problem of the Planets [in Ptolemaic cosmology],” “The Two-Sphere Universe in Aristotelian Thought,” “Recasting the Tradition: Aristotle to Copernicus,” “Copernicus’ Innovation,” “The Assimilation of Copernican Astronomy,” and “The New Universe” as it came to be understood after the revolution in thinking. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first ed. 1962), Kuhn claimed that science does not evolve gradually toward truth, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he called "paradigm shifts." Ironically, this book was originally printed as a volume in the International Encyclopedia for Unified Science, which was conceived and published by the Vienna circle—the logical positivists. It is ironic because Kuhn seemed to be an arch anti-positivist (although that claim about him came to be doubted in the 1990s). The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured by the revolution it brought about even in the vocabulary of the history and philosophy of science. Besides “paradigm” and “paradigm shifts,” Kuhn coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term “scientific revolutions” in the plural, taking place at different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single "Scientific Revolution" in the late Renaissance. Kuhn began this book by declaring that there should be a role for history in theory of science, and that this can produce a “decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” Moreover, the textbooks used to teach the next generation of scientists, offer “a concept of science … no more likely to fit the enterprise that produced them than an image of a national culture drawn from a tourist brochure or a language text” (p. 1). He also declared that “methodological directives” are insufficient “to dictate a unique substantive conclusion to many sorts of scientific questions” (3). Next, Kuhn introduced his notion of “normal science” and said that it “means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice” (10). These achievements can be called “paradigms,” a term much used by Kuhn and a central point of Kuhn’s theory—for better or worse. Paradigms, according to Kuhn, are essential to science. “In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant” (15). Moreover, “no natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism” (16-17). “Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute.” Normal science, then, is a puzzle-solving activity consisting of mopping-up activities, guided by the reigning paradigm. “Rules derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide science even in the absence of rules” (42). “Normal research, which is cumulative, owes its success to the ability of scientists regularly to select problems that can be solved with conceptual and instrumental techniques close to those already in existence" (96). Over time, however, new and unsuspected phenomena—anomalies—are uncovered by scientific research, things that will not fit into the reigning paradigm. When a sufficient failure of normal science to solve the emerging anomalies occurs, a crises results, and this eventually leads to the emergence of a new scientific theory, a revolution. A reorientation occurs that breaks with one tradition and introduces a new one. Kuhn stated that the new paradigm is incompatible and incommensurable with the old one. Such “scientific revolutions are … non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one” (92). This crisis and its accompanying revolution lead to a division of camps and polarization within the science, with one camp striving to hold onto and defend the old paradigm or institutional constellation, while the other upholds and seeks to have the new one replace the old one. “That difference [between competing paradigms] could not occur if the two were logically compatible. In the process of being assimilated, the second must displace the first” (97). Moreover, proponents of the two cannot really speak with each other, for “To the extent … that two scientific schools disagree about what is a problem and what is a solution, they will inevitably talk through each other when debating the relative merits of their respective paradigms” (109). Scientific revolutions amount to changes of world view. Scientific revolutions, Kuhn claied, tend to be invisible because they “have customarily been viewed not as revolutions but as additions to scientific knowledge” (136). This is primarily because of textbooks, which “address themselves to an already articulated body of problems, data, and theory, most often to the particular set of paradigms to which the scientific community is committed at the time they are written.” Textbooks, popularizations, and philosophy of science all “record the stable outcome of past revolutions” and are “systematically misleading” (137). “Textbooks … are produced only in the aftermath of a scientific revolution. They are the bases for a new tradition of normal science” (144). Moreover, “depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession” (138). Although it may superficially resemble or mimic them, neither verification, as claimed by the positivists, nor falsification, as propounded by Popper, are the methods by which theory change actually occurs. Instead, Kuhn claimed, something resembling religious conversion happens. A new paradigm first needs a few supporters—usually younger people who are not committed or beholden to the older one. “Probably the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they can solve the problems that have led the old one to a crisis” (153). The main issue in circumstances of competing paradigms is “which paradigm will in the future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely (157). Because of that “a decision is called for” (157) and “in the circumstances that decision must be based less on past achievement than future promise” (157-158). But Kuhn denied that “new paradigms triumph ultimately through some mystical aesthetic” (158). The remaining central question for growth of scientific knowledge is, Kuhn acknowledged, “Why should the enterprise [he sketches in his theory] … move steadily ahead in ways that, say, art, political theory, or philosophy does not” (160). He suggested that the answer is partly semantic because, “To a very great extent the term ‘science’ is reserved for fields that do progress in obvious ways.” This is shown "in the recurrent debates about whether one or another of the contemporary social sciences is really a science” (160). Kuhn declared that “we tend to see as science any field in which progress is marked” (162). “It is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assured” (163). But, he asked, “Why should progress also be the apparently universal concomitant of scientific revolutions?” He answered that “Revolutions close with a total victory for one of the opposing camps. Will that group ever say that the result of its victory has been something less than progress? That would be rather like admitting that they had been wrong and their opponents right” (166). “The very existence of science,” he wrote, “depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community” (167). And, “a group of this sort must see a paradigm change as progress” (169). But Kuhn denied that a paradigm change of the kind he describes leads toward the truth. “We may … have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes in paradigms carry scientists and those who learn from them closer to the truth” (170). But this is no great loss because, he asked, “Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal? If we can learn to substitute evolution-from-what-we-do-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know, a number of very vexing problems may vanish in the process” (171). Moreover, “the entire process may have occurred, as we now suppose biological evolution did, without benefit of a set goal, a permanent fixed scientific truth, of which each stage in the development of scientific knowledge is a better example” (172-173). Criticism of Kuhn Many people responded to Kuhn’s work, and the responses ranged from extremely favorable to highly critical. Dudley Shapere gave a harshly critical review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in Philosophical Review 73 (1964). W.V.O. Quine wrote that Kuhn's work contributed to a wave of “epistemological nihilism.” Quine continued, "This mood is reflected in the tendency of … Kuhn … to belittle the role of evidence and to accentuate cultural relativism"(Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, p. 87). Some people praised Kuhn’s opening to consideration of the sociology and psychology of science. Others—Karl Popper, for an important example—condemned this as a prostitution, or at least severe misrepresentation, of science. Some claimed that Kuhn’s work was progressive in that it opened the door to a new and fresh understanding of what science is and how it operates. But Steve Fuller, in Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, claimed that Kuhn’s work is reactionary because Kuhn tried to remove science from public examination and democratic control. One of the most important and influential examinations of Kuhn’s work took place at the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, held at Bedford College, Regent’s Park, London, on July 11-17, 1965, with Popper presiding. The proceedings are gathered in a book entitled Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. In that colloquium, John Watkins argued against normal science. Steven Toulmin asked whether the distinction between normal and revolutionary science holds water. Margaret Masterman pointed out that Kuhn’s use of “paradigm” was highly plastic—she showed more than twenty different usages. L. Pearce Williams claimed that few, if any, scientists recorded in the history of science were "normal" scientists in Kuhn’s sense; i.e. Williams disagreed with Kuhn both about historical facts and about what is characteristic for science. Others then and since have argued that Kuhn was mistaken in claiming that two different paradigms are incompatible and incommensurable because, in order for things to be incompatible, they must be directly comparable or commensurable. Popper himself admitted that Kuhn had caused him to notice the existence of normal science, but Popper regarded normal science as deplorable because, Popper claimed, it is unimaginative and plodding. He pointed out that Kuhn’s theory of science growing through revolutions fits only some sciences because some other sciences have in fact been cumulative—a point made by numerous other critics of Kuhn. In addition, Popper claimed that Kuhn really does have a logic of scientific discovery: The logic of historical relativism. He and others pointed out that in claiming that a new paradigm is incommensurable and incompatible with an older one Kuhn was mistaken because, Popper claimed, “a critical comparison of the competing theories, of the competing frameworks, is always possible.” (Popper sometimes called this the "myth of the framework.") Moreover, Popper continued, “In science (and only in science) can we say that we have made genuine progress: That we know more than we did before” (Lakatos & Musgrave, 57). Kuhn responded in an essay entitled “Reflections on my Critics.” In it he discussed further the role of history and sociology, the nature and functions of normal science, the retrieval of normal science from history, irrationality and theory choice, and the question of incommensurability and paradigms. Among many other things, he claimed that his account of science, notwithstanding some of his critics, did not sanction mob rule; that it was not his view that “adoption of a new scientific theory is an intuitive or mystical affair, a matter for psychological description rather than logical or methodological codification” (Lakaos & Musgrave, 261) as, for example, Israel Scheffler had claimed in his book Science and Subjectivity—a claim that has been made against Kuhn by numerous other commentators, especially David Stove—and that translation (from one paradigm or theory to another) always involves a theory of translation and that the possibility of translation taking place does not make the term “conversion” inappropriate (Lakatos & Musgrave, 277). Kuhn’s work (and that of many other philosophers of science) was examined in The Structure of Scientific Theories, ed. with a Critical Introduction by Frederick Suppe. There Kuhn published an important essay entitled “Second Thoughts on Paradigms” in which he admitted that his use of that term had been too plastic and indefinite and had caused confusion, and he proposed replacing it with “disciplinary matrix.” (Suppe, 463) In an “Afterward” to the 1977 Second Edition of this work, Suppe claimed that there had been a waning of the influence of what he dubbed the Weltanschauungen views of science such as that of Kuhn. Examination and criticism of Kuhn's work—pro and con, with the con side dominant among philosophers, but the pro side tending to be supported by sociologists of science and by deconstructionists and other irrationalists—continues into the twenty first century. Kuhn is frequently attacked as a purveyor of irrationalism and of the view that science is a subjective enterprise with no objective referent—a view Kuhn strongly denied that he held or supported. One problem is that Kuhn tended to complain that his critics misunderstood and misrepresented him and that he did not hold what they represented him as holding—even though they could point to passages in which he seemed to say explicitly what they claimed he held—but he did not give them much in response that would serve to show that they were wrong or that he actually held to any defensible form of scientific rationalism. Since he gave up the notion of an external referent or “ultimate truth” as the aim or goal of science, it was nearly impossible for him to specify anything except a completely conventionalist account of growth or progress in scientific knowledge. On the question of Kuhn's relationship to logical positivism (or logical empiricism), George Reisch—in a 1991 essay entitled “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?”—argued that Kuhn did not do so because there were two previously unpublished letters from Rudolf Carnap (Carnap was regarded by most observers as being the strongest, most important, or arch-logical positivist) to Kuhn in which Carnap expressed strong approval of Kuhn’s work, suggesting that there was a closer relationship between Kuhn and logical positivism than had been previously recognized. "Post-Kuhnian" philosophy of science produced extensive responses to and critiques of the apparently relativistic and skeptical implications of Kuhn's work—implications Kuhn himself disowned. But, as noted above, Kuhn's disowning of those implications is puzzling and perhaps even disingenuous, given what Kuhn actually wrote on those topics. Kuhn’s work after Structure Kuhn published three additional books after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. They were The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977), Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894-1912 (1978; 1984; and reprinted in 1987 with an afterword, “Revisiting Planck”), and The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview (Ed. by James Conant and John Haugeland, published posthumously, 2000). Subsequent editions of The Copernican Revolution were published in 1959, 1966, and 1985. A second revised edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1970, and a third edition in 1996. Essential Tension and The Road Since Structure were mostly collections of previously published essays, except that Road contains a long and informative interview-discussion with him conducted in Athens, Greece, on October 19-21, 1995, by three Greek interviewers; the occasion was the awarding of an honorary doctorate by the Department of Philosophy and History of Philosophy by the University of Athens and a symposium there in his honor. Understandably, given the importance of Structure and the enormous outpouring of interest and criticism it provoked, almost all of Kuhn's work after it consisted of further discussions and defenses of things he had written, responses to critics, and some modifications of positions he had taken. During his professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kuhn worked in linguistics. That may not have been an especially important or productive aspect of his work. But in his response "Reflections on my Critics," especially section 6 entitled "Incommensurability and Paradigms," where he wrote "At last we arrive at the central constellation of issues which separate me from most of my critics," Kuhn wrote about linguistic issues, and that set of problems or issues may have been the focus of his later work at MIT. Understanding of Kuhn's work in Europe In France, Kuhn's conception of science has been related to Michel Foucault (with Kuhn's paradigm corresponding to Foucault's episteme) and Louis Althusser, although both are more concerned by the historical conditions of possibility of the scientific discourse. (Foucault, in fact, was most directly influenced by Gaston Bachelard, who had developed independently a view of the history of scientific change similar to Kuhn's, but—Kuhn claimed—too rigid.) Thus, they do not consider science as isolated from society as they argue that Kuhn does. In contrast to Kuhn, Althusser's conception of science is that it is cumulative, even though this cumulativity is discontinuous (see his concept of Louis Althusser's "epistemological break") whereas Kuhn considers various paradigms as incommensurable. Kuhn's work has also been extensively used in social science; for instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International Relations. References ISBN links support NWE through referral fees Primary Sources (In chronological order) Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957, 1959, 1965. —The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. —The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977. —Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. —The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993. Ed. by James Conant and John Haugeland Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. (This book contains a complete bibliography of Kuhn's writings and other presentations.) Secondary Sources Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton: Princeton University Press and Acumen Press, 2000. Einstein, Albert and Leopold Infeld. The Evolution of Physics New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938. Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Lakatos, Imre and Alan Musgrave, Eds, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. London: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Lakatos, Imre and Paul Feyerabend. For and Against Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Quine, W.V. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Raymo, Chet. “A New Paradigm for Thomas Kuhn,” Scientific American. September, 2000. Reisch, George. “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?” Philosophy of Science 58 (1991). Rothman, Milton A. A Physicist's Guide to Skepticism. Prometheus, 1988. Sardar, Ziauddin. Thomas Kuhn and the Science Wars. Totem Books, 2000. Scheffler, Israel. Science and Subjectivity. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1967 Shapere, Dudley. “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Philosophical Review. 73, 1964. (A review of Kuhn's book.) Stove, David. Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult. Transaction Publishers, 2001. Suppe, Frederick. The Structure of Scientific Theories, Second Ed. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977 Wolpert, Lewis. The Unnatural Nature of Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. All links retrieved April 30, 2023. Thomas Kuhn, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. General Philosophy Sources
7992	dbpedia	0	58	https://lccn.loc.gov/n50046179	en	Library of Congress LCCN Permalink n50046179			[ "https://lccn.loc.gov/images/auth-banner-left.gif", "https://lccn.loc.gov/images/auth-banner-center.gif", "https://lccn.loc.gov/images/auth-banner-right.gif", "https://lccn.loc.gov/images/icon-ext2.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "LC Catalog", "LC Authorities", "LCCN Permalink", "persistent identifier LCCN: n50046179" ]	null	[]	null	LCCN Permalink provides persistent links to metadata records in LC Authorities. LCCN: n50046179	en	/icon/fav.ico		null	Found inThe Copernican revolution, 1957: title page (Thomas S. Kuhn) The structure of scientific revolutions, 1962: title page (Thomas S. Kuhn) Barnes, Barry. T.S. Kuhn and social science, 1981: title page (T.S. Kuhn) The trouble with the historical philosophy of science, 1992: CIP title page (Thomas S. Kuhn, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, MIT) data sheet (Thomas Samuel Kuhn) New York times, June 19, 1996: obituaries (Thomas S. Kuhn; dies at 73; scholar who altered the paradigm of scientific change; died June 17, 1996 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts) Kʻu-en, 1996: page 1, 4th group (Thomas Samuel Kuhn [in rom.]) p. 2, 4th group (Kʻung-en; Kʻo-en) Internet encyclopedia of philosophy, viewed July 9, 2018 (Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996); Thomas Samuel Kuhn; historian and philosopher of science; born July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio; doctorate in physics from Harvard University in 1949; taught at Berkeley and Princeton; joined the faculty at MIT in 1979; died June 17, 1996, in Cambridge, Massachusetts) <http://www.iep.utm.edu/kuhn-ts/> Information from 678 converted Dec. 16, 2014 (b. July 18, 1922)
7992	dbpedia	1	1	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn	en	Thomas Kuhn	https://upload.wikimedia…/Thomas_Kuhn.jpg	https://upload.wikimedia…/Thomas_Kuhn.jpg	[ "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/icons/wikipedia.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-wordmark-en.svg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-tagline-en.svg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/87/Thomas_Kuhn.jpg/220px-Thomas_Kuhn.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Wikiquote-logo.svg/34px-Wikiquote-logo.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/Commons-logo.svg/30px-Commons-logo.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/96/Symbol_category_class.svg/16px-Symbol_category_class.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e0/Symbol_question.svg/16px-Symbol_question.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cd/Socrates.png/18px-Socrates.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/Nuvola_apps_kalzium.svg/28px-Nuvola_apps_kalzium.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8a/OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg/10px-OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg.png", "https://login.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAutoLogin/start?type=1x1", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/wikimedia-button.svg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/poweredby_mediawiki.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Contributors to Wikimedia projects" ]	2001-09-24T16:29:53+00:00		en	/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn	Not to be confused with Thomas Kuhn (Michigan politician). American philosopher of science (1922–1996) Thomas Samuel Kuhn ( ; 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. Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon "objectivity" alone. Science must account for subjective perspectives as well, since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/worldview of its researchers and participants. Early life, family and education [edit] Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Minette Stroock Kuhn and Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, both Jewish.[9] From kindergarten through fifth grade, he was educated at Lincoln School, a private progressive school in Manhattan, which stressed independent thinking rather than learning facts and subjects. The family then moved 40 mi (64 km) north to the small town of Croton-on-Hudson, New York where, once again, he attended a private progressive school – Hessian Hills School. It was here that, in sixth through ninth grade, he learned to love mathematics. He left Hessian Hills in 1937. He graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, in 1940.[10] He obtained his BSc degree in physics from Harvard College in 1943, where he also obtained MSc and PhD degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949, respectively, under the supervision of John Van Vleck. [11] As he states in the first few pages of the preface to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his three years of total academic freedom as a Harvard Junior Fellow were crucial in allowing him to switch from physics to the history and philosophy of science. Career [edit] Kuhn taught a course in the history of science at Harvard from 1948 until 1956, at the suggestion of university president James Conant. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the history of science in 1961. Kuhn interviewed and tape recorded Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before Bohr's death.[12] At Berkeley, he wrote and published (in 1962) his best known and most influential work:[13] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. He served as the president of the History of Science Society from 1969 to 1970.[14] In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [edit] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) was originally printed as an article in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, published by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. In this book, heavily influenced by the fundamental work of Ludwik Fleck (on the possible influence of Fleck on Kuhn see[15]), Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "paradigm shifts" (although he did not coin the phrase, he did contribute to its increase in popularity),[16] in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is followed by "normal science", when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by "puzzle-solving".[6]: 35–42 Guided by the paradigm, normal science is extremely productive: "when the paradigm is successful, the profession will have solved problems that its members could scarcely have imagined and would never have undertaken without commitment to the paradigm".[6]: 24–25 In regard to experimentation and collection of data with a view toward solving problems through the commitment to a paradigm, Kuhn states: The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not "the given" of experience but rather "the collected with difficulty." They are not what the scientist sees—at least not before his research is well advanced and his attention focused. Rather, they are concrete indices to the content of more elementary perceptions, and as such they are selected for the close scrutiny of normal research only because they promise opportunity for the fruitful elaboration of an accepted paradigm. Far more clearly than the immediate experience from which they in part derive, operations and measurements are paradigm-determined. Science does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that paradigm has partially determined. As a result, scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete laboratory manipulations.[6]: 126 During the period of normal science, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science. The difference between the normal and revolutionary science soon sparked the Kuhn-Popper debate. In SSR, Kuhn also argues that rival paradigms are incommensurable—that is, it is not possible to understand one paradigm through the conceptual framework and terminology of another rival paradigm. For many critics, for example David Stove (Popper and After, 1982), this thesis seemed to entail that theory choice is fundamentally irrational: if rival theories cannot be directly compared, then one cannot make a rational choice as to which one is better. Whether Kuhn's views had such relativistic consequences is the subject of much debate; Kuhn himself denied the accusation of relativism in the third edition of SSR, and sought to clarify his views to avoid further misinterpretation. Freeman Dyson has quoted Kuhn as saying "I am not a Kuhnian!",[17] referring to the relativism that some philosophers have developed based on his work. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the single most widely cited book in the social sciences.[18] The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides "paradigm shift", Kuhn popularized the word paradigm itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics and the work of Georg Lichtenberg to its current broader meaning, coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term "scientific revolutions" in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single scientific revolution in the late Renaissance. The frequent use of the phrase "paradigm shift" has made scientists more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that Kuhn's analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced that evolution.[citation needed] Kuhn's work has been extensively used in social science; for instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International Relations. Kuhn is credited as a foundational force behind the post-Mertonian sociology of scientific knowledge. Kuhn's work has also been used in the Arts and Humanities, such as by Matthew Edward Harris to distinguish between scientific and historical communities (such as political or religious groups): 'political-religious beliefs and opinions are not epistemologically the same as those pertaining to scientific theories'.[19] This is because would-be scientists' worldviews are changed through rigorous training, through the engagement between what Kuhn calls 'exemplars' and the Global Paradigm. Kuhn's notions of paradigms and paradigm shifts have been influential in understanding the history of economic thought, for example the Keynesian revolution,[20] and in debates in political science.[21] A defense Kuhn gives against the objection that his account of science from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions results in relativism can be found in an essay by Kuhn called "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice."[22] In this essay, he reiterates five criteria from the penultimate chapter of SSR that determine (or help determine, more properly) theory choice: Accurate – empirically adequate with experimentation and observation Consistent – internally consistent, but also externally consistent with other theories Broad Scope – a theory's consequences should extend beyond that which it was initially designed to explain Simple – the simplest explanation, principally similar to Occam's razor Fruitful – a theory should disclose new phenomena or new relationships among phenomena He then goes on to show how, although these criteria admittedly determine theory choice, they are imprecise in practice and relative to individual scientists. According to Kuhn, "When scientists must choose between competing theories, two men fully committed to the same list of criteria for choice may nevertheless reach different conclusions."[22] For this reason, the criteria still are not "objective" in the usual sense of the word because individual scientists reach different conclusions with the same criteria due to valuing one criterion over another or even adding additional criteria for selfish or other subjective reasons. Kuhn then goes on to say, "I am suggesting, of course, that the criteria of choice with which I began function not as rules, which determine choice, but as values, which influence it."[22] Because Kuhn utilizes the history of science in his account of science, his criteria or values for theory choice are often understood as descriptive normative rules (or more properly, values) of theory choice for the scientific community rather than prescriptive normative rules in the usual sense of the word "criteria", although there are many varied interpretations of Kuhn's account of science. Post-Structure philosophy [edit] Years after the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn dropped the concept of a paradigm and began to focus on the semantic aspects of scientific theories. In particular, Kuhn focuses on the taxonomic structure of scientific kind terms. In SSR he had dealt extensively with "meaning-changes". Later he spoke more of "terms of reference", providing each of them with a taxonomy. And even the changes that have to do with incommensurability were interpreted as taxonomic changes.[23] As a consequence, a scientific revolution is not defined as a "change of paradigm" anymore, but rather as a change in the taxonomic structure of the theoretical language of science.[24] Some scholars describe this change as resulting from a 'linguistic turn'.[25][26] In their book, Andersen, Barker and Chen use some recent theories in cognitive psychology to vindicate Kuhn's mature philosophy.[27] Apart from dropping the concept of a paradigm, Kuhn also began to look at the process of scientific specialisation. In a scientific revolution, a new paradigm (or a new taxonomy) replaces the old one; by contrast, specialisation leads to a proliferation of new specialties and disciplines. This attention to the proliferation of specialties would make Kuhn's model less 'revolutionary' and more "evolutionary". [R]evolutions, which produce new divisions between fields in scientific development, are much like episodes of speciation in biological evolution. The biological parallel to revolutionary change is not mutation, as I thought for many years, but speciation. And the problems presented by speciation (e.g., the difficulty in identifying an episode of speciation until some time after it has occurred, and the impossibility even then, of dating the time of its occurrence) are very similar to those presented by revolutionary change and by the emergence and individuation of new scientific specialties.[28] Some philosophers claim that Kuhn attempted to describe different kinds of scientific change: revolutions and specialty-creation.[29] Others claim that the process of specialisation is in itself a special case of scientific revolutions.[30] It is also possible to argue that, in Kuhn's model, science evolves through revolutions.[31] Polanyi–Kuhn debate [edit] Although they used different terminologies, both Kuhn and Michael Polanyi believed that scientists' subjective experiences made science a relativized discipline. Polanyi lectured on this topic for decades before Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Supporters of Polanyi charged Kuhn with plagiarism, as it was known that Kuhn attended several of Polanyi's lectures, and that the two men had debated endlessly over epistemology before either had achieved fame. After the charge of plagiarism, Kuhn acknowledged Polanyi in the Second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.[6]: 44 Despite this intellectual alliance, Polanyi's work was constantly interpreted by others within the framework of Kuhn's paradigm shifts, much to Polanyi's (and Kuhn's) dismay.[32] Honors [edit] Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963,[33] elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1974,[34] elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1979,[35] and, in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. He also received numerous honorary doctorates. In honor of his legacy, the Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award is awarded by the American Chemical Society to speakers who present original views that are at odds with mainstream scientific understanding. The winner is selected based on the novelty of the viewpoint and its potential impact if it were to be widely accepted.[36] Personal life [edit] Thomas Kuhn was married twice, first to Kathryn Muhs with whom he had three children, then to Jehane Barton Burns (Jehane B. Kuhn). In 1994, Kuhn was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in 1996. Bibliography [edit] Kuhn, T. S. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. ISBN 0-674-17100-4 Kuhn, T. S. The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science. Isis, 52 (1961): 161–193. Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. ISBN 0-226-45808-3 Kuhn, T. S. "The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research". pp. 347–369 in A. C. Crombie (ed.). Scientific Change (Symposium on the History of Science, University of Oxford, July 9–15, 1961). New York and London: Basic Books and Heineman, 1963. Kuhn, T. S. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977. ISBN 0-226-45805-9 Kuhn, T. S. Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ISBN 0-226-45800-8 Kuhn, T. S. The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-45798-2 Kuhn, T. S. The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. References [edit] Further reading [edit] Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen. The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0521855754 Alexander Bird. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press and Acumen Press, 2000. ISBN 1-902683-10-2 Steve Fuller. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-26894-2 Matthew Edward Harris. The Notion of Papal Monarchy in the Thirteenth Century: The Idea of Paradigm in Church History.' Lampeter and Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7734-1441-9. Paul Hoyningen-Huene Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ISBN 978-0226355511 Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Meaning Changes: A Study of Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy. AV Akademikerverlag, 2012. ISBN 978-3639444704 Errol Morris. The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-226-51384-3 Sal Restivo, The Myth of the Kuhnian Revolution. Sociological Theory, Vol. 1, (1983), 293–305.
7992	dbpedia	0	19	https://news.mit.edu/1996/kuhn	en	Prof. Thomas S. Kuhn of MIT, Noted Historian of Science, Dead at 73	https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico	https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico	[ "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	1996-06-18T09:00:00+00:00		en	/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico	MIT News \| Massachusetts Institute of Technology	https://news.mit.edu/1996/kuhn	CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Professor Emeritus Thomas S. Kuhn of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the internationally known historian and philosopher who made seminal contributions to understanding how scientific views are supported and discounted over time, died Monday, June 17, at his home in Cambridge. He had been ill for the last two years with cancer of the bronchial tubes and throat. He was 73. Professor Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), an enormously influential work on the nature of scientific change, was widely celebrated as the central figure in contemporary thought about how the scientific process evolves. Earlier this month, for example, Vice President Albert Gore, delivering the June 7 commencement address at MIT, spoke of the relationship "between science and technology on the one hand and humankind and society on the other," and referred to "the great historian of science, Thomas Kuhn." Mr. Gore said Professor Kuhn "described the way in which our understanding of the world properly evolves when faced with a sudden increase in the amount of information. More precisely, he showed how well-established theories collapse under the weight of new facts and observations which cannot be explained, and then accumulate to the point where the once useful theory is clearly obsolete. As new facts continue to accumulate, a new threshold is reached at which a new pattern is suddenly perceptible and a new theory explaining this pattern emerges. It is an important process, not only at the societal level, but for each of us as individuals as we try to make sense of the growing mountain of information placed at our disposal." More than one million copies of Professor Kuhn's famous 1962 book have been printed. It exists in more than a dozen languages and continues to be a basic text in the study of the history of science and technology. From 1982 to 1991, when he became an emeritus professor, Dr. Kuhn held the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professorship in Philosophy. He was the chair's first holder. Jed Z. Buchwald, the Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and director of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, said Professor Kuhn "was the most influential historian and philosopher of science or our time. He instructed and inspired his students and colleagues at Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton and MIT, as well as the tens of thousands of scholars and students in his own and other fields of social science and the humanities who read his works." Professor Kuhn joined MIT in 1979 from Princeton University where he had been the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of the History of Science and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. At MIT, his work has centered on cognitive and linguistic processes that bear on the philosophy of science, including the influence of language on the development of science. Born in Cincinnati in 1922, Professor Kuhn studied physics at Harvard University, where he received the SB (1943), AM (1946) and PhD (1949). His shift from an interest in solid state physics to the history of science, was traceable to a "single 'Eureka!' moment in 1947," according to a 1991 Scientific American article. Professor Kuhn, the article says, "was working toward his doctorate in physics at Harvard University when he was asked to teach some science to undergraduate humanities majors. Searching for a simple case history that could illuminate the roots of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle's Physics and was astonished at how 'wrong' it was. How could someone so brilliant on other topics be so misguided in physics? Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the window of his dormitory room . . .when suddenly Aristotle 'made sense.' Kuhn realized that Aristotle's views of such basic concepts as motion and matter were totally unlike Newton's. Aristotle used the word 'motion,' for example, to refer not just to change in position but to change in general. . . . Understood on its own terms, Aristole's physics 'wasn't just bad Newton,' Kuhn says; it was just different." Professor Kuhn taught at Harvard and at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining Princeton in 1964. From 1978 to 1979 he was a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities. His honors included the Howard T. Behrman Award for distinguished achievements in the humanities (1977), the History of Science Society's George Sarton Medal (1982) and the Society for Social Studies of Science's John Desmond Bernal Award (1983). He became a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and was given honorary degrees by several universities throughout the world. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Philosophy of Science Association (president, 1988-90), and the History of Science Society (president, 1968-70). Professor Kuhn is survived by his wife, Jehane (Barton) Kuhn; two daughters, Sarah Kuhn-La Chance of Framingham, Mass., and Elizabeth Kuhn of Los Angles, and a son, Nathaniel Kuhn of Arlington, Mass. The service is private. A memorial service will be held at MIT in the fall.
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7992	dbpedia	2	77	https://www.overlandparkchapel.com/obituaries/thomas-kuhn	en	Thomas Joel Kuhn Obituary 2023	https://cdn.tukioswebsites.com/social/facebook/fb_3/d401ff1a-467b-48fd-85db-26466947368d/b8a4d64a39746635862b9e1480678f4a_ba831e9f478bded813beeff16b658e15	https://cdn.tukioswebsites.com/social/facebook/fb_3/d401ff1a-467b-48fd-85db-26466947368d/b8a4d64a39746635862b9e1480678f4a_ba831e9f478bded813beeff16b658e15	[ "https://cdn.tukioswebsites.com/obituary_cover/lg/a214460f-db61-4273-91af-98bc10614634", "https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/GL8n3OTpSlqaVa5wof1W", "https://cdn.tukioswebsites.com/obituary_profile_photo/md/4bad3c35-8a31-4840-98eb-d961fff2e365", "https://manage2.tukioswebsites.com/images/flower-cta.svg", "https://manage2.tukioswebsites.com/images/tree-cta.svg", "https://manage2.tukioswebsites.com/images/card-cta.svg", "https://manage2.tukioswebsites.com/images/card-cta.svg", "https://www.overlandparkchapel.com/obituaries/provider_thumbnail", "https://manage2.tukioswebsites.com/images/flower-cta.svg", "https://manage2.tukioswebsites.com/images/tree-cta.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Overland Park Funeral Chapel" ]	2023-12-22T18:43:48	Thomas Joel Kuhn, 70, formerly of Hays, KS, passed away peacefully at home December 21st, 2023, in Prairie Village, KS after a long bout with Lewy Body Dementia. He was born Nov...	en	https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/yHiuobLRPOvOE1vM75Y8	Overland Park Funeral Chapel	https://www.overlandparkchapel.com/obituaries/thomas-kuhn	Thomas Joel Kuhn, 70, formerly of Hays, KS, passed away peacefully at home December 21st, 2023, in Prairie Village, KS after a long bout with Lewy Body Dementia. He was born November 28, 1953, as a twin in Beloit, KS to Frederick O. and Lola Catherine Pargett Kuhn. Graduating from Cawker City High School in 1971, Tom went on to Fort Hays State University, Hays, KS to earn a B.S. degree in English Journalism and a M.S. in Guidance and Counseling. He met the love of his life while at FHSU. On June 19, 1976, Tom married Cathy Ann Nauert in Larned, KS. They settled in Hays where they raised a family of 2 amazing boys. He was employed with Kansas SRS and at Fort Hays State University as the Human Resource Director until retiring in 2012, meeting many wonderful people there. In 2020 Tom and Cathy moved to Prairie Village, KS to be closer to the children. Tom grew up on the family farm near the Nebraska border north of Cawker City, KS alongside his two brothers. His love of the outdoors began on the farm which he lovingly referred to as “God’s Country”. His greatest enjoyment came from family, spending quality time with their two sons and bicycling across Kansas numerous times as well as the United States on three routes. He completed the Triple Bypass and Pedal the Peaks along with other bicycling events. Tom also had a passion for running, finishing several half and full marathons during his lifetime. Two of his most favorite things to do included having coffee with the boys and spending time in his bike shed which was built by his oldest son. Survivors include his wife Cathy, of the home; two sons, Brian and wife Courtney Kuhn of Prairie Village, KS (granddaughters Reese and Marlow), Brandon and wife Ann Kuhn (granddaughter arriving in 2024) of Buffalo, N.Y.; his twin brother Tim and wife Faye of Pratt, KS, his sister-in-law Carol Kuhn of Beloit, KS. He had four other sisters-in law and two brothers-in law: Carol Mott of Wichita, KS, Connie Lett of Olathe, KS, Cherie (Terry) Berndt of Manhattan, KS, and Cristi (Richard) Mourn of Colorado Springs, CO; and nieces and nephews Kelli (Tim) Barker, Kristen (Jake) Windscheffel, Ryan (Haley) Mott, Melissa Mott, Ethan Lett, Hunter Berndt, Austin (Starla) Mourn, Cambria (John) Szabo, Jenna Mourn, and 5 great nieces and 7 great nephews. He was preceded in death by his grandparents, parents, a brother, Carle, and his only uncle, Roland Kuhn. A celebration of life will be at a later date. Cremation has taken place, and his ashes will be taken to the Kuhn Family Farm in a private ceremony. In lieu of flowers, please perform a random act of kindness in Tom’s memory or donate to your favorite charity/organization.
7992	dbpedia	1	22	https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn	en	Thomas Samuel Kuhn	https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/psychology/images/9/9f/Thomas_Kuhn_by_Alexander_Bird.gif/revision/latest?cb=20060304121356	https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/psychology/images/9/9f/Thomas_Kuhn_by_Alexander_Bird.gif/revision/latest?cb=20060304121356	[ "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/psychology/images/9/9f/Thomas_Kuhn_by_Alexander_Bird.gif/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/250?cb=20060304121356", "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/6a181c72-e8bf-419b-b4db-18fd56a0eb60", "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/6c42ce6a-b205-41f5-82c6-5011721932e7", "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/464fc70a-5090-490b-b47e-0759e89c263f", "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/f7bb9d33-4f9a-4faa-88fe-2a0bd8138668" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Contributors to Psychology Wiki" ]	null	Assessment \| Biopsychology \| Comparative \| Cognitive \| Developmental \| Language \| Individual differences \| Personality \| Philosophy \| Social \| Methods \| Statistics \| Clinical \| Educational \| Industrial \| Professional items \| World psychology \| Philosophy Index: Aesthetics · Epistemology · Ethics...	en	/skins-ucp/mw139/common/favicon.ico	Psychology Wiki	https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn	Assessment \| Biopsychology \| Comparative \| Cognitive \| Developmental \| Language \| Individual differences \| Personality \| Philosophy \| Social \| Methods \| Statistics \| Clinical \| Educational \| Industrial \| Professional items \| World psychology \| Philosophy Index: Aesthetics · Epistemology · Ethics · Logic · Metaphysics · Consciousness · Philosophy of Language · Philosophy of Mind · Philosophy of Science · Social and Political philosophy · Philosophies · Philosophers · List of lists Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American intellectual who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the philosophy of science. Life[] Descendant of a [Jewish family, Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He obtained his bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943, his master's in 1946 and Ph.D. in 1949, and taught a course in the history of science there from 1948 until 1956 at the suggestion of Harvard president James Conant. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. In 1964 he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, and in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science. He was also awarded numerous honorary doctorates. He suffered cancer of the bronchial tubes for the last two years of his life and died Monday June 17 1996. He was survived by his wife Jehane R. Kuhn, his ex-wife Kathryn Muhs Kuhn, and their three children, Sarah, Elizabeth and Nathaniel. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)[] Thomas Kuhn is most famous for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) (1962) in which he presented the idea that science does not evolve gradually toward truth, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he calls "paradigm shifts." The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the revolution it brought about even in the vocabulary of the history of science: besides "paradigm shifts," Kuhn raised the word "paradigm" itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics to its current broader meaning, coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term "scientific revolutions" in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single "Scientific Revolution" in the late Renaissance. In France, Kuhn's conception of science has been related to Michel Foucault (with Kuhn's paradigm corresponding to Foucault's episteme) and Louis Althusser, although both are more concerned by the historical conditions of possibility of the scientific discourse - which Judith Butler calls "the limits of acceptable discourse". Thus, they do not consider science as isolated from society as they argue that Kuhn does. In contrast to Kuhn, Althusser's conception of science is that it is cumulative, even though this cumulativity is discontinuous (see his concept of "epistemological break") whereas Kuhn considers various paradigms as incommensurable. Bibliography[] The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957) Kuhn, T.S. (1961). The function of measurement in modern physical science. ISIS, 52, 161-193. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) (ISBN 0226458083) The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977) Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (Chicago, 1987) (ISBN 0226458008) The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) (ISBN 0226457982) See also[] Important publications in philosophy of science History and philosophy of science [] Thomas Kuhn (Biography, Outline of Structure of Scientific Revolutions) Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm (obituary by Lawrence Van Gelder, New York Times, 19 June 1996) Thomas S. Kuhn (obituary, The Tech p9 vol 116 no 28, 26 June 1996) Thomas Kuhn at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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]	null	[]	1922-07-18T00:00:00+00:00		en	/favicon.ico	Timetoast Timelines	https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/the-life-and-death-of-thomas-kuhn	Thomas Kuhn (Childhood and Early years) Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in July 18, 1922. He was the son of Minette Scrook Kuhn and Samuel L. Kuhn. He went to a high school in New York known as Hessian Hills. He attended Taft School in Watertown and that is where he discovered his passion for mathematics and physics. In 1940, He graduated from the Taft School. He went to Harvard, where in 1943 he graduated with his B.S. degree in physics. He later went back to Harvard and got his M.S. degree in 1946 and 1949. Thomas Kuhn Military Work Thomas Kuhn joined the Radio Research Lab theoretical group where his job was to come up with counter measures against the enemies radar. After that he was sent to go work in the military lab in the United Kingdom. He went to France with the Royal Air Force to study German radar installations that they had captured. Thomas Kuhn's (History of Science) Thomas Kuhn was attending Harvard where he was working on his physics doctorate focusing completely on the development of his ideas as a science historian and philosopher. He was excited and preoccupied with the mechanisms which are used to understand scientific process. He taught the History of Science as a professor at Harvard, University of California and Princeton University. He really enjoyed teaching a lot when he was at the schools. He modeled after Isaac Newton's theories. Thomas Kuhn ( Career) Thomas Kuhn's career first started in Radio Research Lab when he was at Harvard. He also worked at the Scientific Research and Development in Europe. He also taught the History of Science as a professor at Harvard. He also was appointed as the professor to teach the History of Science at the University of California. He became a professor to teach the History of Science at Princeton University. He was often called the Rockefeller of Philosophy. Thomas Kuhn's Book's This book that was published in 1957, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was his most influential work. In his book he talked about how competing paradigms are incommensurable. He proposed a notion of paradigm shifts so that the scientific fields can undergo shifts periodically as long as it doesn't progress in a linear and continuous pattern. In his book, The Copernican Revolution, he refuted the claims of other scientist that the earth was in the center of the solar system. Thomas Kuhn (Paradigm Shift) Thomas Kuhn became known when he presented his concept the Paradigm Shift. People used it in all subjects, not just science. Thomas Kuhn explained his concept of the Paradigm Shift in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His framework came form the paths laid by other intelligent men such as Aristotle, Isaac Newton and Galileo. The change in the framework, was in itself the Paradigm Shift. Thomas Kuhn stated that sometimes you have to go back in order to find the starting point. Thomas Kuhn's Theory for Normal Science After a paradigm has already taken place, scientist can start building up facts again by studying different problems and finding facts that exist in different places that was suggested by a new paradigm. This period between paradigm shifts is known as normal science or puzzle solving. Thomas Kuhn's (Awards and Achievements) Thomas Kuhn was chosen to be the esteemed Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He was given the prestigious title Guggenheim Fellow. The History of Science Society gave him the George Sarton Medal. Along with all his books that were very influential as the framework for those studying philosophy and trying to understand the concept of science in the world as well as the universe and beyond. In his honor, he got the Paradigm Shift Award by the Chemical Society. Thomas Kuhn's Theory (Incommensurability and World Change) Thomas Kuhn used the term Incommensurable so that he can be able to give a description of paradigms that will represent a whole world that has different views on the same subject. He talked about how the mechanics of Newton and Aristotle differ in a way that is so drastic that there is no room for common ground.
7992	dbpedia	0	39	https://www.coursehero.com/lit/The-Structure-of-Scientific-Revolutions/author/	en				[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null
7992	dbpedia	2	36	https://www.butler-bowdon.com/thomas-kuhn---the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions.html	en	Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions	https://cdn2.editmysite.…holder-blank.png	https://cdn2.editmysite.…holder-blank.png	[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) Thomas Kuhn Thomas Kuhn was a graduate student in theoretical physics at Harvard, close to finishing his dissertation for his PhD, when he was asked to...	en		Tom Butler-Bowdon	https://www.butler-bowdon.com/thomas-kuhn---the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions.html	The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) Thomas Kuhn Thomas Kuhn was a graduate student in theoretical physics at Harvard, close to finishing his dissertation for his PhD, when he was asked to teach an experimental college course on science for non-scientists. It was his first real taste of the history of science, and it changed his life. To his surprise, the course altered some of his basic assumptions about science, and the result was a big shift in his career plans from physics to the history and then philosophy of science. In his mid-30s he wrote a book on Copernicus, and five years later produced The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A monograph of only 170 pages, the book sold over a million copies, was translated into 24 languages, and became one of the most cited works of all time in both the natural and social sciences. Its success was highly unusual for an academic work, and was a shock to Kuhn himself. The work is shortish because it was originally composed with the aim of being a long article in the Encylopedia of Unified Science. Once published, this article was expanded into a separate book. This limitation turned out to be a blessing, as he was prevented from going into lengthy and difficult scientific detail, making the book just readable for the layman. Why has the Structure made such a huge impact? If its message has been restricted to science itself the work would still be very important, but it is the generic idea of ‘paradigms’, in which one world view replaces another, that has been considered valuable across so many areas of knowledge. Indeed, at several points in the book Kuhn touches on the fact that paradigms exist not only in science, but are the natural human way of comprehending the world. The roots of the book lay in an experience Kuhn had reading Aristotle, when he realised that Aristotle’s laws of motion were not just ‘bad Newton’, but a completely different way of seeing the world. Science is made by scientists Kuhn starts by saying that the traditional textbook accounts of the development of science can no more tell us about reality than a tourist brochure can tell us about a nation’s culture. The textbooks present an incremental accumulation of facts, and describe theories borne out by successful experiments that lead to increasing amounts of knowledge. But does science really proceed in such a neat way? Kuhn sought a less arrogant and more open view that understood scientific advance not as isolated individuals making great discoveries, but in terms of the scientific community and the intellectual environment of the day allowing (or disallowing) the reinterpretation of existing data. Central to his argument is that scientists do not proceed by simply describing how nature works, but rather work within paradigms of understanding which, once they turn out to be deficient in explaining phenomena, are replaced by new ones. He defines paradigms as “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners”. Why is this view of scientific progress different? The conventional view of science is: ‘here are the facts’ about the world, and ‘here we are’ (the scientists) uncovering them. But facts do not exist without an observer, which means that the interests of the observer are all-important to what constitutes current science. Moreover, the progress of science is only partly about the discovery of the new; it concerns changing how we see what we already thought we knew. X-rays, Kuhn notes, “were greeted not only with surprise but with shock”, because they did not fall into any existing theory. When a paradigm is replaced by another one, the world itself seems to change: “What were ducks in the scientist’s world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards.” One of Kuhn’s startling insights is that paradigms can have integrity, providing most of the answers to most of the questions asked of them in their day, and yet also be fundamentally wrong. For a long time the earth-centred view seemed to be a good explanation of cosmology, satisfying most people, until the various anomalies within the model became too obvious to ignore, and a sun-centred paradigm became accepted. But the human affinity for certainty means such revolutions are always resisted. Real discovery begins with recognition of anomalies, or nature acting in a way that it is not meant to. Scientists don’t know what to do with these facts, and so they are not ‘scientific’ until they have found a home in an existing theory. A paradigm starts to crumble when there is a heightened insecurity about the capacity of the paradigm to solve the puzzles it has set for itself. Practitioners keep getting the ‘wrong’ answers. The paradigm is in crisis mode, and it is at such points that breakthroughs to a new paradigm are possible e.g. Copernican astronomy, Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Kuhn observes that in the early stages of a new discipline there is usually no established paradigm, only competing views trying to explain some aspect of nature. Each of these views may be following established scientific method, but only one view becomes the accepted way of seeing. This is not because everyone comes to agree on the facts, but because it is easier to work with a single paradigm; human psychology comes much more into play than we would like to admit. Science, Kuhn notes, does not progress coldly and clinically of its own volition, but is made by scientists. Normal and revolutionary science Kuhn makes a distinction between ‘normal’ science, and the type of scientific thinking or research which can cause revolutions in how we see the world. Normal science is based on the assumption “that the scientific community knows what the world is like”, and furthermore, “Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary at considerable cost.” Normal science tends to suppress anomalous facts because they are a road block in a pre-committed theoretical path. Kuhn defines these novelties or anomalies within an existing paradigm as a “violation of expectation”. The response to anomalies is hardly ever to renounce the existing paradigm; it is to keep working within it to see what went wrong. Only a tiny minority of scientists can truly ‘think outside the box’ and look at nature in a fresh way. The basis of joining any scientific community is the study of its paradigm, and the vast majority of scientists will spend their lives working on things within that paradigm: smaller puzzles that need to be solved, or incremental research. Or, they work to produce findings that can bring nature and the theory/paradigm closer together, like many scientists did in the wake of Newton’s Principia. Normal science is “an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sets of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all.” The problem is that when an unexpected novelty appears, scientists will either reject it out of hand as a ‘mistake’ or put it down to a failure of method to prove what you were expecting. Thus the aim of normal science is not to find something new, but to make the existing paradigm more precise, to bring nature into accord perfectly with the theory. Scientific revolutions, on the other hand, Kuhn says are the “tradition shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science”. New theories are not simply new facts, but wholesale changes in how we see those facts. This in turn leads to the reconstruction of theories, which is “an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed by a single man and never overnight”. Two different worlds: the incommensurability of paradigms Since paradigm change is not a rational process, but rather a gulf between what different parties see, paradigms do not compete. They cannot agree on the methodology to tackle problems, or even on the language needed to describe them; the paradigms are ‘incommensurable’, Kuhn says, because they have no common standard by which to judge each other. Neither is it a case of each paradigm being closer or further away from an objective truth about the universe. The very essence of paradigms is that they are about the people who make and propose them, and each effectively inhabits a different world. Kuhn quotes Max Planck: “[A] new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Indeed, it took over a century following his death for Copernicus’ views to really catch on, and Newton’s ideas were not generally accepted for over 50 years after he published the Prinicipia. Kuhn concludes that, “The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced.” But scientific communities do eventually catch on, and begin the process of ‘proving’ what the new paradigm suggests must be right. Final comments The Structure was shocking in its suggestion that science does not take humanity on a neat linear path towards some objective truth about the reality of the world via the accumulation of empirical observations (what can be called the Enlightenment view), but is in fact a human creation. If science is the attempt to make our theories fit nature, then it is human nature that we have to contend with first. We like to weave advances or changes in scientific understanding into a grand story of progress, but Kuhn’s implication is that science has no aim, but simply adapts its explanations to reality as best it can. In the second edition of the book, Kuhn made it clear that he wasn’t a relativist, and that he believed in scientific progress. However, he also made clear that science was like the theory of evolution: it evolves from something simpler, but you couldn’t say that it has a final end or direction to it. A common interpretation of Kuhn is that paradigms are ‘bad’ and give people a blinkered view, when they should be always questioning the paradigm that underlies their discipline. In fact, Kuhn noted that the acquisition of a paradigm is a sign that a field has matured into something real, because it at least has a set of rules that the practitioners can agree on. Paradigms are neither positive nor negative, but simply give us a way of seeing the world. The real value lies in seeing paradigms objectively, and admitting the possibility that our truths may be just assumptions. Source: Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting, Seeing, Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books by Tom Butler-Bowdon (London & Boston: Nicholas Brealey.
7992	dbpedia	0	4	https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/historians-us-biographies/thomas-samuel-kuhn	en	Thomas Samuel Kuhn			[ "https://www.encyclopedia.com/themes/custom/trustme/images/header-logo.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "Get information", "facts", "and pictures", "about Thomas Samuel Kuhn", "at Encyclopedia.com", "Make", "research", "projects", "and school reports", "about Thomas Samuel Kuhn", "easy", "with credible", "articles", "from our FREE", "online encyclopedia and dictionary" ]	null	[]	null	KUHN, THOMAS SAMUEL(b. Cincinnati, Ohio, 18 July 1922; d.	en	/sites/default/files/favicon.ico		https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/historians-us-biographies/thomas-samuel-kuhn	KUHN, THOMAS SAMUEL (b. Cincinnati, Ohio, 18 July 1922; d. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 17 June 1996), philosophy of science, history of science, concept of paradigm. A physicist turned historian of science for philosophical purposes, Kuhn was one of the most influential philosophers of science in the twentieth century. In his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962, Kuhn helped destroy the popular image of science according to which science steadily and incrementally progresses toward a true and complete picture of reality. Relying on historical case studies, Kuhn argued that, ruptured by scientific revolutions, scientific development was discontinuous and noncumulative and that scientific activity before and after a revolution was in some ways incommensurable, lacking a common measure. In this way Kuhn not only formed a startling picture of science, but also initiated a new way of doing philosophy of science informed by the history of science. Life and Career . Thomas Kuhn was the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, who was trained as a hydraulic engineer at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Annette Stroock Kuhn. Both parents were nonpracticing Jews. Kuhn attended several schools in New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Among them, Hessian Hills in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, a progressive school that encouraged independent thinking, made a particularly strong impression on him. He then attended Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in physics in 1943. Despite the fact that his interest lay in theoretical physics, most of his coursework was in electronics, due to the orientation of his department. His professors included George Birkhoff, Percy W. Bridgman, Leon Chaffee, and Ronald W. P. King. He also took several elective courses in social sciences and humanities, including a philosophy course in which Immanuel Kant struck him as a revelation. He did not enjoy the history of science course that he attended, which was taught by the famous historian of science George Sarton. After graduation, he worked on radar for the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard and later for the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development in Europe. He returned to Harvard at the end of the war, obtained his master’s degree in physics in 1946, and worked toward a PhD degree in the same department. He also took a few philosophy courses in order to explore other possibilities than physics. It was about this time that the legendary president of Harvard University, the chemist and founder of “Harvard Case Studies in Experimental Science” James Conant, asked Kuhn to assist his course on science, designed for undergraduates in humanities as part of the General Education in Science Curriculum. This event changed Kuhn’s life. His encounter with classical texts, especially Aristotle’s Physics, was a crucial experience for him. He realized that it was a great mistake to read and judge an ancient scientific text from the perspective of current science and that one could not really understand it unless one got inside the mind of its author and saw the world through his eyes, through the conceptual framework he employed to describe phenomena. This understanding shaped his later historical and philosophical studies. In 1948 Kuhn became a junior member of the Harvard Society of Fellows upon Conant’s recommendation. A year later, he completed his PhD in physics under the supervision of John H. van Vleck, who won the Nobel Prize in 1977. Kuhn became an assistant professor of general education and the history of science in 1952 and taught at Harvard until 1956. During this period he trained himself as a historian of science, and Alexandre Koyré’s works, especially his Galilean Studies, had a deep impact on him. Between 1948 and 1956, Kuhn published three articles, one with van Vleck on computing cohesive energies of metals, derived from his PhD dissertation, and a number of historical works on Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Sadi Carnot’s cycle. He also wrote his first book, The Copernican Revolution, which was published in 1957. Nevertheless, Kuhn was denied tenure because the review committee thought that the book was too popular and not sufficiently scholarly. Feeling disappointed, Kuhn accepted a joint position as an assistant professor in the history and philosophy departments at the University of California, Berkeley. Soon after, he published his masterpiece, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It was also here that he met Paul Feyerabend, who introduced a version of the thesis of incommensurability at the same time Kuhn did. But the interaction was not fruitful. The person who influenced him most at Berkeley was Stanley Cavell. Cavell introduced him to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose view of meaning as use and idea of family resemblance had a lasting influence on Kuhn. He also heard Michael Polányi’s lectures on tacit knowledge, a notion that also found its way into his influential book. Between 1961 and 1964 he headed a project known as the “Sources for History of Quantum Physics,” which contained interviews with, and manuscript materials of, all the major scientists who contributed to the development of quantum physics. These materials are now part of the Archive for History of Quantum Physics. Kuhn was offered a full professorship at Berkeley in history, not in philosophy. Although disappointed, he accepted the offer. Not long after, however, he left Berkeley for the position of M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. He taught at Princeton from 1964 to 1979 and then, because of his divorce, he left Princeton and joined the philosophy department at MIT. In 1982 he was appointed to the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professorship in Philosophy, a position he held until 1991 when he retired. He became professor emeritus at MIT from then on until his death. He was survived by his second wife Jehane, his ex-wife Kathryn Muhs, and their three children. Thomas Kuhn received the Howard T. Behrman Award for distinguished achievements in the humanities (1977), the History of Science Society’s George Sarton Medal (1982), and the Society for Social Studies of Science’s John Desmond Bernal Award (1983). He was a Guggenheim Fellow during 1954 to 1955, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1972–1979), a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He also held honorary degrees from Columbia, Chicago, and Notre Dame universities in the United States, the University of Padua in Italy, and the University of Athens in Greece. He was the only person to have served as presidents of both the History of Science Society (1968–1970) and the Philosophy of Science Association (1988–1990). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Structure for short) opens with the sentence, “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed” (1970, p. 1). According to that image, science progresses toward truth in a linear fashion, each new theory incorporating the old one as a special case. Scientific progress is due to the scientific method, whereby theories are tested against observations and experiments; those that fail are disconfirmed or get eliminated and those that pass the tests are considered to be confirmed, or at least not yet falsified. This image was very popular among scientists, and in the philosophical world it was represented in various forms by logical positivists such as Rudolf Carnap, who emphasized confirmability and by Karl Popper, who emphasized falsifiability. Most logical positivists, though emphatically not Popper, also believed that observation provided neutral and secure grounds for the appraisal of scientific theories. It was generally agreed that scientific rationality and objectivity was a matter of compliance with the rules of scientific method, leaving little room for individual choices. Although Structure contained only one explicit reference to Popper and none to the logical positivists, clearly it targeted them, and together with the works of Norwood Hanson, Paul Feyerabend, and Stephen Toulmin, it destroyed the existing conception of science and scientific change. The main thesis of Kuhn’s book was that development in mature sciences typically goes through two consecutive phases: normal and revolutionary. Normal science is a paradigm-governed activity of puzzle solving. Based on settled consensus of the scientific community, normal scientific activity has little room for novelty that transcends the bounds of the paradigm. A paradigm provides a concrete model (called an “exemplar”) for solving problems it has set out. Kuhn called these problems “puzzles” because the paradigm assures the members of the scientific community that with sufficient skill and ingenuity they can be solved within its resources. Thus, in case of failure to solve a puzzle it is the individual scientist, not the paradigm, that is to be blamed. When, however, puzzles resist persistent attempts at solution, they turn into anomalies; and anomalies lead to a crisis when they accumulate. Crisis is marked by a loss of confidence in the paradigm and a search for an alternative one. Rival accounts proliferate, the most fundamental commitments about nature get questioned, and in the end, the scientific community embraces the most promising alternative as the new paradigm. A scientific revolution has occurred. Consequently, a new period of normal science begins, and a similar cycle of normal science–crisis–revolution follows. Whereas normal science is cumulative, revolutionary science is not. The new paradigm and the activity governed by it are in many ways incompatible with the old one. Kuhn expressed this point in terms of the thesis of incommensurability, which has several aspects. Both problems and the way they are solved change: there is a conceptual change, whereby certain terms acquire new meanings; because every observation is theory-laden, there is a perceptual change, a Gestalt switch, which causes the scientists to see the world differently; and, finally, there is even a sense in which the world itself changes after a revolution. For instance, according to Kuhn, the Aristotelian world contains swinging stones, but no pendulums. Accordingly, whereas the Aristotelian scientist sees constrained motion in a swinging stone, the Galilean-Newtonian scientist (who may as well be a transformed Aristotelian) literally sees a pendulum. In short, the new paradigm is incommensurable with the old one. Scientists working under rival paradigms often talk past each other and experience a breakdown in communication. The switch from one paradigm to another is very much like a conversion experience rather than a rational choice dictated mechanically by scientific methodology. Furthermore, much that has been accepted as true is discarded, making it impossible to say that the new paradigm brings us closer to truth. Not surprisingly, Structure sent shock waves through the philosophical community. Kuhn was accused of robbing science of its rationality and objectivity, turning it into a kind of mob psychology; he was charged with relativism, subjectivism, and outright idealism. Normal science was said to be dangerously dogmatic. The notion of “paradigm” was held to be too vague, lacking a definite meaning. In the “Postscript” to Structure, which was added to the second edition in 1970, and in several subsequent articles, most notably “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice,” collected in The Essential Tension, published in 1977, Kuhn defended himself against these charges, clarifying some of his earlier statements and retracting others. In this context the first thing he did was to clarify what he meant by “paradigm,” for which he now preferred the term “disciplinary matrix.” A disciplinary matrix consisted of four elements: metaphysical commitments; methodological commitments; criteria such as quantitative accuracy, broad scope, simplicity, consistency, and fruitfulness (which Kuhn called “values” since they are desired characteristics of scientific theories); and exemplars. The most important of these is exemplars, that is, concrete problem solutions that serve as models. Exemplars are always given in use; they guide research even in the absence of rules; and the study of exemplars enables scientists to acquire an ability to see family resemblances among seemingly unrelated problems. Much knowledge that is acquired in this way is tacit, inexpressible in propositions. Normal science is dogmatic to some degree, since it does not allow the questioning of the paradigm itself, but this sort of dogmatism is functional: it allows the scientists to further articulate their paradigmatic theory and pay undivided attention to the existing puzzles and anomalies, the recognition of which is a precondition for the emergence of novel theories and subsequently a revolution. In this way Kuhn dispelled the charges of vagueness and dogmatism. He also took pains to argue that incommensurability, the target of the greatest outrage, did not necessarily imply incomparability. Two paradigms, he said, often share enough common points to make it possible to compare them. For example, the astronomical data regarding the position of Mercury, Mars, and Venus were shared by both the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic and Copernican paradigms, and they both appealed to similar criteria (“values”). These commonalities provided sufficient grounds for paradigm comparison. Kuhn pointed out, however, that two scientists working under rival paradigms may share the same criteria but apply them differently to concrete cases. When they are confronted with a new puzzle, they may disagree, for instance, about whether paradigm A or B provides a simpler solution, or they may attach different weights to the shared criteria. This is a perfectly rational disagreement, and the only way to resolve it is through the techniques of persuasion. It is for this reason that paradigm choice often involves subjective, though not arbitrary, decisions. Rather than denying rationality, Kuhn developed a new conception of it. For him rationality is not just a matter of compliance with methodological rules. This is because the knowledge of how to apply a paradigm to a new puzzle is mostly learned not by being taught abstract rules but by being exposed to concrete exemplars. Yet this is a kind of tacit knowledge that is almost impossible to detach from the cases from which it was acquired. Thus, both paradigm choice and paradigm application often involve judgment and deliberation, a process akin to Aristotle’s phronesis; each scientist must use her lifelong experience, her “practical wisdom,” to make the best possible decision. In short, Kuhn urged a shift from a conception of rationality based on the mechanical application of determinate rules to a model of rationality that emphasizes the role of exemplars, deliberation, and judgment. Kuhn also argued that science does progress, but not toward truth in the sense of correspondence to an objective reality, because later theories are incommensurable with the earlier ones. Scientific progress for Kuhn simply meant increasing puzzle-solving ability: later theories are better than earlier ones in discovering and solving more and more puzzles. Appealing to the existence of shared criteria for paradigm comparison and to an instrumental idea of scientific progress, Kuhn tried to defend himself against the charge of relativism. The Linguistic Turn . In the 1980s and 1990s Kuhn wrote a number of articles, reformulating most of his philosophical views in terms of language, more specifically in terms of what he called taxonomic lexicons. These articles were published posthumously in the collection The Road since Structure (2000) and can be summarized as follows. First of all, having abandoned the terms disciplinary matrix as well as the much-used and -abused term paradigm in favor of theory, Kuhn now underlined the point that every scientific theory has its own distinctive structured taxonomic lexicon: a taxonomically ordered network of kind-terms, some of which are antecedently available relative to the theory in question. Second, lexicons are prerequisite to the formulation of scientific problems and their solutions, and descriptions of nature and its regularities. Hence, revolutions can be characterized as significant changes in the lexicons of scientific theories: both the criteria relevant to categorization and the way in which given objects and situations are distributed among preexisting categories are altered. Since different lexicons permit different descriptions and generalizations, revolutionary scientific development is necessarily discontinuous. Third, the distinction between normal and revolutionary science now becomes the distinction between activities that require changes in the scientific lexicon and those that do not. Revolutions involve, among other things, novel discoveries that cannot be described within the existing lexical network, so scientists feel forced to adopt a new one. The earlier mentalistic description (i.e., Gestalt switches and conversions) disappears from Kuhn’s writings. Finally, incommensurability is reduced to a sort of untranslatability, localized to one or another area in which two lexical structures differ. What gives rise to incommensurability is the difference between lexical structures. Because rival lexical structures differ radically, there are sentences of one theory that cannot be translated into the lexicon of the other theory without loss of meaning. All other aspects of incommensurability that were present in Structure drop out. Kuhn also gave a Kantian twist to these ideas. He argued that structured lexicons are constitutive of phenomenal worlds and possible experiences of them. In Kuhn’s view a taxonomic lexicon functions very much like the Kantian categories of the mind. This in turn led him not only to embrace a distinction between noumena and phenomena, but also to claim that fundamental laws, such as Newton’s second law, are synthetic a priori. The sense of a priori Kuhn had in mind is not “true for all times,” but something like “constitutive of objects of experience.” This is a historical or relativized a priori, like Hans Reichenbach’s. Taxonomic lexicons do vary historically, unlike Kantian categories. Even the second law is revisable despite the fact that it is recalcitrant to refutation by isolated experiments. Accordingly, Kuhn’s final position can be characterized as an evolutionary linguistic Kantianism. Using first principles, as it were, regarding the structure of taxonomic lexicons of scientific theories, and having a developmental perspective not simply derivative from the historical case studies, Kuhn’s linguistic turn enabled him to refine, add to, and unify his earlier views about scientific revolutions, incommensurability, and exemplars. He was also able to explain more clearly why incommensurability does not imply incomparability and why communication breakdown across a revolution is always partial. This is because incommensurability is a local, not global, phenomenon pertaining to a small subset of the scientific lexicon, and whatever communication breakdown exists can be overcome by becoming bilingual. Furthermore, he was finally able to articulate the sense in which the scientist’s world itself changes after a revolution. That sense is Kantian. Whereas the noumenal world is fixed, the phenomenal world constituted by a lexicon is not. Different lexicons “carve up,” as it were, different phenomenal worlds from the unique noumenal world, so Kuhn could now respond to the charge of idealism by pointing out that the noumenal world does exist independently of human minds, though it remains unknowable. History of Science . In the background of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is The Copernican Revolution, Kuhn’s first major contribution to the historiography of science. That book grew out of Kuhn’s science course for the humanities at Harvard in the 1950s and provided one of the key historical case studies that later enabled him to articulate his views about the development of science. The Copernican Revolution achieved several things at once. It showed above all that Nicolaus Copernicus was both a revolutionary and a conservative at the same time. Contrary to popular belief, the Copernican heliocentric system, with its rotating spheres, perfectly circular orbits, epicycles, and eccentricities, was in many ways a continuation of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic tradition of astronomy. But this conservativeness also meant that the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic tradition was a respectable scientific enterprise, having its own conceptual framework, problems, and ways of solving them. When looked at retrospectively, however, the Copernican system did pave the way, albeit unintentionally, for a revolution in science through the works of Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Newton. Kuhn argued forcefully in his book that aesthetic considerations played an important role in Copernicus’s placing the Sun at the center and thus turning Earth into an ordinary planet; the Ptolemaic system looked increasingly complicated, indeed “monstrous,” in the eyes of Copernicus. Although his model did not automatically yield simpler calculations, it provided qualitatively more coherent interpretations of certain phenomena, notably, the retrograde motion of planets. In addition to these, Kuhn drew attention to social factors behind the Copernican Revolution as well, such as the need for calendar reform, improved maps, and navigational techniques. Kuhn also pointed out the larger ramifications of the heliocentric system—in particular, how it changed the conception human beings had of their unique place in the universe and what sense that conception had for them. After The Copernican Revolution, Kuhn wrote a number of influential historical articles, including one on energy conservation as an example of simultaneous discovery, one on the difference between mathematical and experimental (dubbed as “Baconian”) traditions in the development of physical sciences, and another, with John Heilbron, on the genesis of the Bohr atom. Most of these are conveniently collected in his book The Essential Tension. Kuhn’s final major contribution to the historiography of science was his controversial book Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912, published in 1978. It constituted a break with a longstanding historio-graphical tradition and undermined the consensus between physicists and historians that quantum physics originated in the works of Max Planck in 1900. According to the traditional interpretation, Planck was forced to introduce the idea of energy quanta, thus breaking with classical physics. More sophisticated versions of this interpretation, which recognized that Planck himself did not understand the exact meaning of the energy quanta, were also defended in various forms by historians of science. In his book Kuhn argued that Planck did not abandon the framework of classical physics until after Hendrik Lorentz, Paul Ehrenfest, and Albert Einstein in 1905 attempted to understand his theory of blackbody radiation. Of the two historical books Kuhn wrote, the earlier one became a small classic of its own. Historians criticized the second one for exaggerating its case and ignoring certain developmental aspects of Planck’s works, and philosophers were surprised that it did not contain any references to “paradigms,” “normal science,” “incommensurability,” and the like. Kuhn defended himself in the second edition, arguing that many of the themes of Structure were there, though implicitly. Kuhn wore two hats, but never simultaneously. He saw the history and the philosophy of science as interrelated but separate disciplines with different aims. He believed that no one could practice them at the same time. As a philosopher, he said, he was interested in generalizations and analytical distinctions, but as a historian he was trying to construct a narrative that was coherent, comprehensible, and plausible. For this latter task, the historian had to pay attention first to the factors internal to science, such as ideas, concepts, problems, and theories, and to external factors like social, economic, political, and religious realities. In his historical works Kuhn focused primarily (but not exclusively) on the internal factors, but believed that although the internal and the external approaches were autonomous, they were complementary. He saw the unification of them as one of the greatest challenges facing the historian of science. Impact . Kuhn’s immense impact on the philosophy of science was exclusively through his works, since he did not supervise any PhD theses in this field. He did have, however, a number of PhD students in the history of science, including John Heilbron, Norton Wise, and Paul Forman, though Forman, in the end, completed his PhD thesis officially under Hunter Dupree. In historiography of science, Kuhn was a first-rate practitioner of the approach inaugurated by Alexandre Koyré, whom he admired deeply. Following Koyré, Kuhn believed that understanding a historical text necessarily involves a hermeneutical activity by which the historian interprets the text in its own terms and intellectual context. This means that the history of science should always be seen as part of the history of ideas, wherein the aim is to produce a maximally coherent interpretation. The historian is not someone who merely chronicles who discovered what and when. The projection of current conceptions onto past events is a cardinal sin often committed by the earlier positivistically inclined generations of historians of science, including Sarton. In the hands of Koyré, Kuhn, Rupert Hall, Bernard Cohen, Richard Westfall, and others, a new way of practicing historiography of science emerged. As a result, the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became the topic that played a decisive role in historiographical developments. Kuhn’s influence was incomparably greater in the field of philosophy. Structure was translated into some twenty languages and sold over a million copies. It is still indispensable reading not only in philosophy of science, but also in philosophy generally. More than any other text, it was responsible for the overthrow of logical positivism both as a source of a certain image of science and as a philosophical practice. After Structure, the field of philosophy of science took a historical turn in the 1970s and 1980s, using historical case studies either to ground or to test “empirically” a given view of the development of science. Kuhn’s views also led to the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge founded by Barry Barnes and David Bloor, who argued that the very content and nature of scientific knowledge can be explained sociologically and a fortiori naturalistically. Kuhn, however, distanced himself from the Strong Programme, characterizing it as a “deconstruction that has gone mad.” With its emphasis on the scientific community and its practices, Kuhn’s philosophy eventually gave rise to what is called social studies of science, a subspecialty that attempts to unify philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and ethnographic approaches into a coherent whole. The feminist critique of science, too, that has emerged since the 1980s owes much to Kuhn’s insights. Indeed, all of these studies are now routinely referred to as “post-Kuhnian.” Kuhn’s views had virtually no impact on the practice of science itself, but they did catch the attention of both physicists and social scientists. While the former group was largely critical, the latter group was mostly sympathetic. The interest of social scientists was to a great extent methodological: they wondered whether sociology, political science, and economics were “mature sciences” like physics and chemistry, governed by a single paradigm at a given period, and whether they conformed to the pattern of normal science–crisis–revolution–normal science. One noticeable effect of such studies was that physical sciences came to be seen as being as interpretive as social sciences were, and in that respect not so different from them. Were Kuhn’s ideas as revolutionary as they were widely taken to be? Recent historical studies on the origins and development of logical positivism indicate that there are as many similarities and continuities as there are differences and discontinuities between that movement and Kuhn’s views. Kuhn himself confessed later in life that he had fortunately very limited firsthand knowledge of logical positivist writings; otherwise, he said, he would have written a completely different book. But, as Alexander Bird put it, like Copernicus and Planck, Kuhn inaugurated a revolution that went far beyond what he himself imagined. BIBLIOGRAPHY WORKS BY KUHN “Robert Boyle and Structural Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century.” Isis 43 (1952): 12–36. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research.” In Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Technical Invention, from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Alistair C. Crombie. London: Heinemann, 1963. With John L. Heilbron, Paul Forman, and Lini Allen. Sources for History of Quantum Physics: An Inventory and Report. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 68. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1967. With John L. Heilbron. “The Genesis of the Bohr Atom.” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 1 (1969): 211–290. “Alexandre Koyré and the History of Science: On an Intellectual Revolution.” Encounter 34 (1970): 67–69. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd enlarged ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. First published in 1962. The second edition contains the 1969 “Postscript.” “Notes on Lakatos.” In PSA 1970: In Memory of Rudolf Carnap; Proceedings of the 1970 Biennial Meeting, Philosophy of Science Association, edited by Roger C. Buck and Robert S. Cohen. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 8. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1971. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. 2nd ed. with a new “Afterword.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. “History of Science.” In Current Research in Philosophy of Science, edited by Peter D. Asquith and Henry E. Kyburg. East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, 1979. “The Halt and the Blind: Philosophy and History of Science.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 31 (1980): 181–192. The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview. Edited by James Conant and John Haugeland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. OTHER SOURCES Barnes, Barry. T. S. Kuhn and Social Science. London: Macmillan, 1982. Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. A critical overview. Darrigol, Olivier. “The Historians’ Disagreement over the Meaning of Planck’s Quantum.” Centaurus 43 (2001): 219–239. Friedman, Michael. “On the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and Its Philosophical Agenda.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 29 (1998): 239–271. Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Galison, Peter. “Kuhn and the Quantum Controversy.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 32 (1981): 71–85. Gutting, Gary, ed. Paradigms and Revolutions. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980. Written by eminent philosophers, social scientists, and historians of science, these essays assess Kuhn’s pre-1980 writings and their impact in various fields. Horwich, Paul, ed. World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. An in-depth discussion of Kuhn’s latest views; also contains Kuhn’s long reply “Afterwords,” which is his final statement. Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Meticulous exposition, with a foreword by Kuhn. Irzik, Gürol, and Teo Grünberg. “Carnap and Kuhn: Arch Enemies or Close Allies?” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (1995): 285–307. Kindi, Vasso. “The Relation of History of Science to Philosophy of Science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Kuhn’s Later Philosophical Work.” Perspectives on Science 13 (2006): 495–530. Koyré, Alexandre. Études galiléennes. Paris: Hermann, 1939. Also 1966 and 1997. Translation by John Mepham as Galilean Studies. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978. Lakatos, Imre, and Alan Musgrave, eds. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. London: Cambridge University Press, 1970. An early classic volume displaying the then-current state of debate among Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend, and others. Newton-Smith, W. H. The Rationality of Science. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. A good overview of philosophy of science. Nickles, Thomas, ed. Thomas Kuhn. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Sankey, Howard. Rationality, Relativism and Incommensurability. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1997. Sharrock, Wes, and Rupert Read. Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2002. Westman, Robert S. “Two Cultures or One?: A Second Look at Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution.” Isis 85 (1994): 79–115. Gürol Irzik Kuhn, Thomas Samuel (b. 18 July 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio; d. 17 June 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts), physicist turned historian and philosopher who transformed the study of the history and philosophy of science in the 1960s. Kuhn was one of two children of Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn, a civic activist and professional editor; both were nonobservant Jews. When Kuhn was an infant, the family moved to New York City. The home atmosphere was politically liberal, and his parents sent him to “progressive” schools that encouraged pupils to think for themselves. In the mid-1930s—as the Great Depression gripped America, fascism threatened Europe, and Stalin tightened his control of the Soviet Union—Kuhn attended the progressive Hessian Hills School in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. There, he later recalled, “there were various radical left teachers all over.” Young Kuhn participated in May Day marches and was an articulate pacifist, but as World War II approached, he changed his mind and supported U.S. intervention. In 1940 he entered Harvard University, where he majored in physics, served as an editor of the Harvard Crimson, and graduated summa cum laude in 1943 (a year early because of wartime mobilization). During the war he worked on radar countermeasures at a U.S. laboratory in England and visited radar facilities on the Continent. He witnessed the liberation of Paris. Afterward, he returned to Harvard and pursued a doctorate in physics, although by this time he was more interested in philosophy, especially that of Kant. The turning point in Kuhn’s life came when he was befriended by Harvard president James B. Conant, who sought Kuhn’s aid in developing a program to teach science to nonscience majors. The course would emphasize “case histories” of scientific research through the centuries. On a hot summer day in 1947, while doing research for the Conant course and reading Aristotle’s Physics, Kuhn experienced an epiphany. To a modern scientist, Aristotle appears hopelessly antiquated, but Kuhn suddenly understood how the philosopher’s physical notions made sense within the intellectual context of ancient Greece. Kuhn compared this new understanding (a type of “empathetic historiography,” that is, the effort to understand past cultures in their own terms rather than critiquing them by modern standards) to the gestalt switch cited by gestalt psychologists. A familiar example of a gestalt switch is a drawing of what appears to be ducks. Gaze at the sketch long enough, and suddenly they look like rabbits: What changes is not the raw data (the drawing) but rather one’s perception of it. According to traditional historical accounts, science had advanced over the centuries by steadily accumulating raw data, in the manner advocated by the Elizabethan scholar-politician Francis Bacon. By contrast, Kuhn realized that fundamental scientific revolutions may occur via reinterpretations of the same old data. His appreciation of the importance of such shifts in consciousness was strengthened when he read the works of Alexandre Koyré, who argued that Galileo’s achievements owed more to the seventeenth-century astronomer’s theoretical insights than to his celebrated physics experiments. On 27 November 1948 Kuhn married Kathryn Muhs; they had three children. Kuhn received his M.S. degree in 1946 and his Ph.D. in 1949, both from Harvard. In 1951 he lectured on the nature of scientific change at the Boston Public Library. From 1952 to 1956 he was an assistant professor of general education and the history of science at Harvard. In 1956 Kuhn accepted a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley. His first book, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957), lucidly explained how in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries astronomers abandoned the ancient astronomer Ptolemy’s Earth-centered cosmology for the Sun-centered theory of Nicolaus Copernicus. Although Copernicus relied on the same observational data as Ptolemy, the former astronomer perceived a totally different arrangement of celestial bodies—another example of a gestalt switch. Kuhn’s most famous work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), depicted the history of science as alternating periods of placid “puzzle-solving” and revolutionary changes of perspective, akin to gestalt switches that he dubbed “paradigm shifts.” A mature scientific field operates with basic assumptions (in other word, paradigms, such as Ptolemaic or Copernican astronomy) that steer research in specific directions. No paradigm is all-explanatory: it always faces a number of “anomalies”—scientific observations or experimental results that challenge its underlying assumptions. (For example, pre-Copernican astronomers struggled for centuries to understand why planets moved in “anomalous” directions inconsistent with predictions of the Ptolemaic cosmology.) During a period of “normal science,” researchers try to explain anomalies in a manner consistent with the paradigm—a process that Kuhn called “puzzle solving.” Over time, the accumulation of anomalies can become unbearable. Scientists struggle to “explain away” the anomalies in increasingly ad hoc ways. Rather than continue sticking with the old paradigm, a few scientists suggest radical alternatives. Most of these alternatives will fail, but one or more might offer real advantages, such as greater conciseness or predictive power. Eventually this new paradigm may displace the old one. Does science progress? In that regard, Kuhn’s most disturbing claim was that scientific paradigms are at least partly “incommensurable”: one paradigm cannot necessarily be treated as a special case subsumed by its successor. For example, the terminology of Newtonian physics cannot readily be translated into the terminology of its successor, Einsteinian physics. This is because terms such as “mass” and “force” have different meanings within each paradigm. (Kuhn’s thinking here was indirectly inspired by the linguistic and anthropological ruminations of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Benjamin Lee Whorf.) True, progress occurs within a paradigm; scientists can accumulate more and more information that is compatible with the paradigm. But when science shifts from one paradigm to another, it is harder to say whether “progress” has occurred, for one paradigm’s terms may be incommensurable with the other’s. Hence, Kuhn suggested, comparing two paradigms is like comparing apples and aardvarks, and a scholar might reasonably question whether one paradigm is “truer” than its predecessor. Although tentative and vague, Kuhn’s comments on incommensurability stirred excitement and controversy, for they appeared (on the surface, anyway) to question a cherished tenet of modernism: that science invariably progresses over the centuries. Indeed, Kuhn suggested (again, somewhat vaguely) that in certain time periods, science may move backward—in other words, lose “knowledge” by pursuing paradigms that prove to be blind alleys. Kuhn’s book became a best-seller by academic standards. About 750,000 copies were sold during his lifetime. His views especially intrigued social scientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, who debated how (and whether) they should try to develop organizing paradigms for their conflict-bloodied fields. Kuhn’s ideas also attracted attention from social critics of science, who gained attention in the 1960s and 1970s partly because of growing public concern about the high-tech Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, and environmental destruction. Kuhn also attracted critics. The philosopher Imre Lakatos accused Kuhn of attributing scientific change to “mob psychology.” Another philosopher, Karl Popper, said Kuhn’s view of “normal science” sanctioned a semiauthoritarian ethic of scientific research. According to Popper, Kuhnianism implied that scientists should blindly obey paradigmatic rules in hopes that these would lead, ironically, to revolutionary insights. To the contrary, Popper declared: scientists should openly challenge authority by proposing “outrageous” hypotheses to test and perhaps “falsify” orthodox ideas. Upset, Kuhn insisted that both his admirers and critics had misinterpreted him. According to academic folklore, his postscript to the 1970 edition of Structure backed away from some of his earlier claims. However, a careful reading of the postscript suggests that he abandoned no crucial position. Kuhn’s status as the field’s radical visionary was challenged by the rise of more overtly radical, colorful figures, such as the “episteme” theorist Michel Foucault and “anarchic epistemologist” Paul K. Feyerabend. Compared to them and the more recent postmodern scholars, Kuhn looked conservative, even orthodox. A distinctly Kuhnian school never emerged. One reason is that some historians of science rejected Kuhn’s model as being too vague or as irrelevant to most historical episodes of scientific change. Another reason is that Kuhn trained few doctoral students. Although he could become passionate and animated during intellectual discussion, he was a shy, chain-smoking loner who liked to cultivate his ideas at his own pace. By his own admission (in a 1995 interview), he tended to drive students away by insisting on rigorous intellectual standards. Kuhn left Berkeley in 1964 for Princeton, where he was the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science until 1979. While at Princeton, he served as physics adviser on the editorial board of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. In the latter part of his Princeton years, he published The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977) and the highly controversial Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912 (1978), which questioned the standard account of Max Planck’s discovery of the quantum nature of matter and energy. In September 1978 Kuhn divorced Kathryn; the next year he became the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On 26 October 1982 he married Jehane Burns. In his last years he tried to complete a final book clarifying his views and answering his critics. The book was unfinished when he died from cancer of the bronchial tubes. Thanks partly to Kuhn, the study of the history of science—once regarded as an academic backwater—became a respectable intellectual field in the late twentieth century. His views have been quoted (and misquoted) by thinkers across the intellectual spectrum, as Hegel’s were in his heyday. Less happily for Kuhn, his ideas were co-opted by popular culture: the term “paradigm shift” has become a cliche from Main Street to Madison Avenue. In popular parlance, it refers to any radical shift of opinion or worldview. Certain aspects of Kuhn’s thinking were anticipated by other scholars, among them Ludwik Fleck in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (original German edition, 1935); R. G. Collingwood in Essay on Metaphysics (1940); W. V. O. Quine in Word and Object (1960); and Stephen Toulmin in Foresight and Understanding (1961). Kuhn frankly discussed his life and work in an interview published as “A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn,” which appears in the Greek scholarly journal Neusis 6 (spring summer 1997): 145–200. Important biographical material, including the possible role of psychoanalytic thought in influencing Kuhn’s philosophical outlook, is in Jensine Andresen, “Crisis and Kuhn,” Isis 90 (1999): S43-S67. The numerous detailed analyses of Kuhn’s work include David A. Hollinger, “T. S. Kuhn’s Theory of Science and Its Implications for History,” American Historical Review (1973): 370, and Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science (1993), both of which Kuhn regarded highly. Attacks on Kuhn appear in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970); Steven Weinberg, “The Revolution That Didn’t Happen,” New York Review of Books (8 Oct. 1998); and Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (2000). A forceful reply to Fuller is David A. Hollinger, “Paradigms Lost,” New York Times Book Review (28 May 2000). A profile of Kuhn in his last years is in John Horgan, The End of Science (1996). Obituaries are in the New York, Times (19 June 1996) and Washington Post (20 June 1996). See also an insightful obituary by one of Kuhn’s early students, John L. Heilbron, “Thomas Samuel Kuhn,” Isis 89 (1998): 505–515. Keay Davidson Thomas Samuel Kuhn Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science. He found that basic ideas about how nature should be studied were dogmatically accepted in normal science, increasingly questioned, and overthrown during scientific revolutions. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1922, Thomas Kuhn was trained as a physicist but became an educator after receiving his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1949. He taught as an assistant professor of the history of science at Harvard from 1952 to 1957, as a professor of the history of science at Berkeley (California) from 1958 to 1964, as a professor of the history of science at Princeton from 1964 to 1979, as a professor of philosophy and the history of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1979 to 1983, and finally, Laurence Rockefeller professor of philosophy at MIT from 1983 to 1991. A member of many professional organizations, he was president of the History of Science Society from 1968 to 1970. He received the Howard T. Behrman award at Princeton in 1977 and the George Sarton medal from the History of Science Society in 1982. Kuhn's scholarly achievements were many. He held positions as a Lowell lecturer in 1951, Guggenheim fellow from 1954 to 1955, fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science from 1958 to 1959, director of the Sources for the History of Quantum Physics Project from 1961 to 1964, director of the Social Science Research Council from 1964 to 1967, director of the program for history and philosophy of science at Princeton from 1967 to 1972, member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1972 to 1979, and member of the Assembly for Behavioral and Social Science in 1980. Kuhn was best known for debunking the common belief that science develops by the accumulation of individual discoveries. In the summer of 1947 something happened that shattered the image of science he had received as a physicist. He was asked to interrupt his doctorate physics project to lecture on the origins of Newton's physics. Predecessors of Newton such as Galileo and Descartes were raised within the Aristotelian scientific tradition. Kuhn was shocked to find in Aristotle's physics precious little a Newtonian could agree with or even make sense of. He asked himself how Aristotle, so brilliant on other topics, could be so confused about motion and why his views on motion were taken so seriously by later generations. One hot summer day while reading Aristotle, Kuhn said he he had a brainstorm. "I gazed abstractly out the window of my room. Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together, my jaw dropped," as reported by his friend and admirer, Malcolm Gladwell, in the July 8th issue of The New Yorker. He realized that he had been misreading Aristotle by assuming a Newtonian point of view. Taught that science progresses cumulatively, he had sought to find what Aristotle contributed to Newton's mechanics. This effort was wrong-headed, because the two men had basically different ways of approaching the study of motion. For example, Aristotle's interest in change in general led him to regard motion as a change of state, whereas Newton's interest in elementary particles, thought to be in continuous motion, led him to regard motion as a state. That continuous motion requires explanation by appeal to some force keeping it in motion was taken as obvious by Aristotle. But Newton thought that continued motion at a certain speed needed no explanation in terms of forces. Newton invoked the gravitational force to explain acceleration and advanced a law that an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an external force. This discovery turned Kuhn's interest from physics to the history of physics and eventually to the bearing of the history of science on philosophy of science. His working hypothesis that reading a historical text requires sensitivity to changes in meaning provided new insight into the work of such great physicists as Boyle, Lavoisier, Dalton, Boltzmann, and Plank. This hypothesis was a generalization of his finding that Aristotle and Newton worked on different research projects with different starting points which eventuated in different meanings for basic terms such as "motion" or "force." Most people probably think that science has exhibited a steady accumulation of knowledge. But Kuhn's study of the history of physics showed this belief to be false for the simple reason that different research traditions have different basic views that are in conflict. Scientists of historically successive traditions differ about what phenomena ought to be included in their studies, about the nature of the phenomena about what aspects of the phenomena do or do not need explanation, and even about what counts as a good explanation or a plausible hypothesis or a rigorous test of theory. Especially striking to Kuhn was the fact that scientists rarely argued explicitly about these basic research decisions. Scientific theories were popularly viewed as based entirely on inferences from observational evidence. But no amount of experimental testing can dictate these decisions because they are logically prior to testing by their nature. What, if not observations, explains the consensus of a community of scientists within the same tradition at a given time? Kuhn boldly conjectured that they must share common commitments, not based on observation or logic alone, in which these matters are implicitly settled. Most scientific practice is a complex mopping-up operation, based on group commitments, which extends the implications of the most recent theoretical breakthrough. Here, at last, was the concept for which Kuhn had been searching: the concept of normal science taking for granted a paradigm, the locus of shared commitments. In 1962 Kuhn published his landmark book on scientific revolutions, which was eventually translated into 16 languages and sold over a million copies. He coined the term "paradigm" to refer to accepted achievements such as Newton's Principia which contain examples of good scientific practice. These examples include law, theory, application, and instrumentation. They function as models for further work. The result is a coherent research tradition. In his postscript to the second edition, Kuhn pointed out the two senses of "paradigm" used in his book. In the narrow sense, it is one or more achievement wherein scientists find examples of the kind of work they wish to emulate, called "exemplars." In the broad sense it is the shared body of preconceptions controlling the expectations of scientists, called a "disciplinary matrix." Persistent use of exemplars as models gives rise to a disciplinary matrix that determines the problems selected for study and the sorts of answers acceptable to the scientific community. Using the paradigm concept, Kuhn developed a theory of scientific change. A tradition is pre-scientific if it has no paradigm. A scientific tradition typically passes through a sequence of normal science-crisis-revolution-new normal science. Normal science is puzzle-solving governed by a paradigm accepted uncritically. Difficulties are brushed aside and blamed on the failure of the scientist to extend the paradigm properly. A crisis begins when scientists view these difficulties as stemming from their paradigm, not themselves. If the crisis is not resolved, a revolution sets in, but the old paradigm is not given up until it can be replaced by a new one. Then new normal science begins and the cycle is repeated. Just when to accept a new paradigm and when to stick to the old one is a matter not subject to proof, although good reasons can be adduced for both options. Scientific rationality is not found in rules of scientific method but in the collective judgment of the scientific community. We must give up the notion that science progresses cumulatively toward the truth about reality; after a revolution it merely replaces one way of seeing the world with another. Kuhn's theory of scientific change was the most widely influential philosophy of science since that of his mentor, Sir Karl Popper. Kuhn's claims were much discussed by scientists, who generally accepted them; by sociologists, who took them to elucidate the subculture of scientists; by historians, who found cases of scientific change not fitting his model; and by philosophers, who generally abhorred Kuhn's historical relativism about knowledge but accepted the need for their theories of science to do justice to its history. Kuhn was often perturbed by those who sought to— in his view—apply his ideas to areas where it was inappropriate. "I'm much fonder of my critics than my fans," he often said, according to Gladwell's New Yorker article. Indeed, he even tried in later years to replace the term "paradigm"—which he felt was being overused—with "exemplar." Kuhn died June 17, 1996, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Notwithstanding the tendency of some to misapply his theories, history will show that Kuhn indeed transformed the image of science by making it exciting and emphasizing that it is a social process in addition to being a rational one. Further Reading Kuhn's four books are The Copernican Revolution (1957), The Essential Tension (1959), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, second edition 1970), and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894-1912 (1978). Clear discussions of his views in order of increasing sophistication are found in George Kneller's Science as a Human Endeavor (1978), Garry Gutting's Paradigms and Revolutions (1980), Harold Brown's Perception, Theory and Commitment (1977), and Ian Hacking's Scientific Revolutions (1981). "My Jaw Dropped," by Malcolm Gladwell in the July 8th issue of The New Yorker is a tribute by an admirer. His obituary, by Lawrence Van Gelder, is in the June 29th edition of The New York Times. □
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"https://prabook.com/web/show-photo-icon.jpg?id=2781127&width=77&cache=false", "https://prabook.com/web/show-photo-icon.jpg?id=2781128&width=77&cache=false", "https://prabook.com/web/show-photo-icon.jpg?id=2781129&width=77&cache=false", "https://prabook.com/web/img/map-stock.png", "https://prabook.com/web/show-photo-icon.jpg?id=2781132&width=220&cache=false", "https://prabook.com/web/show-photo-icon.jpg?id=2781133&width=220&cache=false" ]	[]	[]	[ "Thomas Kuhn profile Cincinnati", "Ohio", "United States educator philosopher scientist writer" ]	null	[]	null	Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science whose controversial 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.	en			https://prabook.com/web/thomas.kuhn/311102	Education From kindergarten through fifth grade, Thomas Kuhn was educated at Lincoln School, a private progressive school in Manhattan where independent thinking rather than learning facts and subjects was practiced. His father grew impatient when, at age seven, his son could not still read or write. With a little coaching from his father, however, Tom was soon reading. The family moved 40 miles (64.37 kilometers) north to the small town of Croton-on-Hudson where, once again, Kuhn attended a progressive private school – Hessian Hills School. It was here that, in sixth through ninth grade, he learned to love mathematics. Influenced by radical teachers, he also hoped to join the leftist American Student Union. Before joining it, members had to swear an oath never to fight for America. After agonizing over this, and talking to his father, he decided he could not sign. He left Hessian Hills in 1937. For tenth grade, Kuhn moved to Solebury School, a private boarding school in Solebury Township, Pennsylvania. His final school was another private boarding school, Taft School, in Watertown, Connecticut. A straight-A student, Kuhn was admitted to Harvard University, his father’s alma mater. He believed this was a great honor, and it was only years later he learned that nearly everyone who applied when he did was admitted to Harvard. He knew he would eventually have to make a choice between majoring in Mathematics or Physics. His father told him it would be easier to get a job as a physicist, so even before leaving for Harvard, Kuhn decided he would major in Physics. Arriving in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the fall of 1940, 18-year-old Kuhn experienced a happy improvement in his social life. In his final prep school years, he had started to feel like an outsider looking in. His frequent moves between high schools must have been unsettling. At Harvard, he felt like he belonged. However, physics proved harder than Kuhn expected, and he scored a C in his first exam. Worried, he asked a professor if he had any future in the subject. The professor told Kuhn he needed to spend time plowing through more problems, making sure he could do them. Kuhn took the advice and scored A at the end of his freshman year. In Kuhn's sophomore year, United States entered World War II. Kuhn decided to speed up his degree by attending classes in summer. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Physics summa cum laude (with the highest honor) in 1943. In addition to studying Physics, he spent his final year as head of the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson, the college newspaper. Kuhn returned to Harvard after the war in Europe ended and graduated with a master’s degree in Physics in 1946 and doctorate in 1949. His Doctor of Philosophy thesis was The Cohesive Energy of Monovalent Metals as a Function of the Atomic Quantum Defects. Even before Kuhn returned to America, his enthusiasm for physics had been dwindling. He continued studying it though, because it was the most convenient way for him to get a doctorate. Career In the summer of 1943, Thomas Kuhn joined the Radio Research Laboratory’s theoretical group. Based at Harvard, his group was tasked with devising countermeasures against enemy radar. He was soon sent to work in a laboratory in the United Kingdom. Later he traveled with a Royal Air Force officer to France for a few weeks to study recently captured German radar installations, then carried on into Germany itself. In September 1948 Kuhn was appointed a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He then turned from physics to reading in the history and philosophy of science, which he had by then decided would be his field of research and teaching, and about which he so far knew little. He had in 1947 given the lectures on early mechanics, from Aristotle to Galileo, but then did not teach until in 1950 he again lectured in the natural science course, now called Research Patterns in Physical Science. Over a period of years, a number of case histories for the natural science course were published separately and eventually collected in two volumes called Harvard Case Studies in Experimental Science (1957). But these were strictly experimental sciences and included nothing of Kuhn’s courses in theoretical sciences, mechanics and, later, astronomy. When his Junior Fellowship ended in 1951, he was appointed Instructor in the General Education program and in 1952 Assistant Professor of General Education and the History of Science. He had written a series of lectures, delivered at the Lowell Institute in 1951, called The Quest for Physical Theory: Problems in the Methodology of Scientific Research, his first attempt at presenting his ideas about the historical development of science, but decided that they were not yet ready for publication. But one of the courses in the natural science program, the Copernican Revolution, did lead to a publication. In 1954, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a book on the subject and to begin work on a project called "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," related to his Lowell Lectures, that he had consented to write for the long-standing, since 1938, publication of the Vienna Circle, now in the United States, the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Each was to take longer than anticipated. By late 1955, the Copernican Revolution was still an uncompleted manuscript of over 500 pages, the work on Scientific Revolutions was not begun, and it was becoming clear that Kuhn did not have a future at Harvard. Fortunately, the prospect of an appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, appeared in early 1956, and in the spring he was offered an Assistant Professorship of the History of Science in the Departments of History and Philosophy. He accepted, and shortly before his move to Berkeley, Harvard University Press accepted the book on the Copernican Revolution, which appeared in 1957. During the period he was writing Structure, in 1960, Kuhn received an offer of a professorship in the history of science at Johns Hopkins with generous support and the promise of three or four additional appointments. When he brought this to the attention of the History and Philosophy Departments at Berkeley, he was asked what would be required to keep him. He mentioned promotion to professor, additional appointments, and a Doctor of Philosophy field in the history of science within philosophy, which he considered his principal department, in which he had students of the history of science. The results were curious. He was informed that he would be promoted, that there would be an additional appointment, but that the philosophy department had no interest in a field in the history of science or in having him continue as a member of the department as he was not considered a philosopher. This really happened, and so the philosophy department at Berkeley has the distinction of having thrown out the most distinguished philosopher of science since, well, make your own choice, certainly of our time. Since he had, perhaps too optimistically, declined the offer from Hopkins, he stayed, but Berkeley was of less and less interest. In 1963, he accepted an offer from the Program in History and Philosophy of Science at Princeton, represented principally by Charles Gillispie in history and Carl Hempel in philosophy, and began there in the fall of 1964. The program, affiliated with the Departments of History and Philosophy, turned out to be well-intentioned but did not really work. The students, of which there were a fair number, called the program history or philosophy of science, few of the students were up to the technical level of Kuhn’s courses, fewer still up to writing a dissertation under his direction, and eventually the philosophy part of the program was discontinued. In 1972, he took up a half-time appointment at The Institute for Advanced Study as a long-term member, and for the rest of the time he was in Princeton, that is where he worked on his largest, most difficult, and most important historical study. This in itself has a history. During the period 1961-1964 at Berkeley, Kuhn was the director of the Sources for the History of Quantum Physics, defined as the period 1898-1933, later extended to 1950, supported by the National Science Foundation and supervised by a joint committee of the American Physical Society and the American Philosophical Society. The assistant director was John Heilbron, the senior editor and archivist Paul Forman, and Lini Allen the administrative officer. In 1979 Kuhn left Princeton for Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, in 1983 as Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor. Kuhn retired from teaching in 1991 and became an emeritus professor at MIT. Views Kuhn was best known for debunking the common belief that science develops by the accumulation of individual discoveries. In the summer of 1947 something happened that shattered the image of science he had received as a physicist. He was asked to interrupt his doctorate physics project to lecture on the origins of Newton's physics. Predecessors of Newton such as Galileo and Descartes were raised within the Aristotelian scientific tradition. Kuhn was shocked to find in Aristotle's physics precious little a Newtonian could agree with or even make sense of. He asked himself how Aristotle, so brilliant on other topics, could be so confused about motion and why his views on motion were taken so seriously by later generations. He realized that he had been misreading Aristotle by assuming a Newtonian point of view. Taught that science progresses cumulatively, he had sought to find what Aristotle contributed to Newton's mechanics. This effort was wrong-headed, because the two men had basically different ways of approaching the study of motion. For example, Aristotle's interest in change in general led him to regard motion as a change of state, whereas Newton's interest in elementary particles, thought to be in continuous motion, led him to regard motion as a state. That continuous motion requires explanation by appeal to some force keeping it in motion was taken as obvious by Aristotle. But Newton thought that continued motion at a certain speed needed no explanation in terms of forces. Newton invoked the gravitational force to explain the acceleration and advanced a law that an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an external force. This discovery turned Kuhn's interest from physics to the history of physics and eventually to the bearing of the history of science on the philosophy of science. His working hypothesis that reading a historical text requires sensitivity to changes in meaning provided new insight into the work of such great physicists as Boyle, Lavoisier, Dalton, Boltzmann, and Plank. This hypothesis was a generalization of his finding that Aristotle and Newton worked on different research projects with different starting points which eventuated in different meanings for basic terms such as "motion" or "force." Most people probably think that science has exhibited a steady accumulation of knowledge. But Kuhn's study of the history of physics showed this belief to be false for the simple reason that different research traditions have different basic views that are in conflict. Scientists of historically successive traditions differ about what phenomena ought to be included in their studies, about the nature of the phenomena about what aspects of the phenomena do or do not need explanation, and even about what counts as a good explanation or a plausible hypothesis or a rigorous test of the theory. Especially striking to Kuhn was the fact that scientists rarely argued explicitly about these basic research decisions. Scientific theories were popularly viewed as based entirely on inferences from observational evidence. But no amount of experimental testing can dictate these decisions because they are logically prior to testing by their nature. What, if not observations, explains the consensus of a community of scientists within the same tradition at a given time? Kuhn boldly conjectured that they must share common commitments, not based on observation or logic alone, in which these matters are implicitly settled. Most scientific practice is a complex mopping-up operation, based on group commitments, which extends the implications of the most recent theoretical breakthrough. Here, at last, was the concept for which Kuhn had been searching: the concept of normal science taking for granted a paradigm, the locus of shared commitments. In 1962 Kuhn published his landmark book on scientific revolutions, which was eventually translated into 16 languages and sold over a million copies. He coined the term "paradigm" to refer to accepted achievements such as Newton's Principia which contains examples of good scientific practice. These examples include law, theory, application, and instrumentation. They function as models for further work. The result is a coherent research tradition. In his postscript to the second edition, Kuhn pointed out the two senses of "paradigm" used in his book. In the narrow sense, it is one or more achievement wherein scientists find examples of the kind of work they wish to emulate, called "exemplars." In the broad sense, it is the shared body of preconceptions controlling the expectations of scientists, called a "disciplinary matrix." Persistent use of exemplars as models gives rise to a disciplinary matrix that determines the problems selected for study and the sorts of answers acceptable to the scientific community. Using the paradigm concept, Kuhn developed a theory of scientific change. A tradition is pre-scientific if it has no paradigm. A scientific tradition typically passes through a sequence of normal science-crisis-revolution-new normal science. Normal science is puzzle-solving governed by a paradigm accepted uncritically. Difficulties are brushed aside and blamed on the failure of the scientist to extend the paradigm properly. A crisis begins when scientists view these difficulties as stemming from their paradigm, not themselves. If the crisis is not resolved, a revolution sets in, but the old paradigm is not given up until it can be replaced by a new one. Then new normal science begins and the cycle is repeated. Just when to accept a new paradigm and when to stick to the old one is a matter not subject to proof, although good reasons can be adduced for both options. Scientific rationality is not found in rules of scientific method but in the collective judgment of the scientific community. We must give up the notion that science progresses cumulatively toward the truth about reality; after a revolution, it merely replaces one way of seeing the world with another. Kuhn's theory of scientific change was the most widely influential philosophy of science since that of his mentor, Sir Karl Popper. Kuhn's claims were much discussed by scientists, who generally accepted them; by sociologists, who took them to elucidate the subculture of scientists; by historians, who found cases of scientific change not fitting his model; and by philosophers, who generally abhorred Kuhn's historical relativism about knowledge but accepted the need for their theories of science to do justice to its history. Kuhn was often perturbed by those who sought to - in his view - apply his ideas to areas where it was inappropriate. Quotations: "To my complete surprise, that exposure to out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically undermined some of my basic conceptions about the nature of science and the reasons for its special success." "Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded." "Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice." "Normal science, the puzzle-solving activity we have just examined, is a highly cumulative enterprise, eminently successful in its aim, the steady extension of the scope and precision of scientific knowledge." "Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way."
7992	dbpedia	3	56	https://www.softschools.com/facts/scientists/thomas_kuhn_facts/1908/	en	Thomas Kuhn Facts			[ "https://www.softschools.com/images/logo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "Thomas Kuhn", "facts", "Thomas Kuhn facts", "Thomas Kuhn facts for kids", "fun facts about Thomas Kuhn" ]	null	[]	null	Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 to June 17, 1996) was an American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science. In 1962 he published his most famous book, <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i>, in which he popularized the term "paradigm shift."	en			null	Interesting Thomas Kuhn Facts: Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his father Samuel Kuhn was an industrial engineer. In 1940 he graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. In 1943 he earned a B.S. in physics from Harvard University. He earned his M.S. in 1946 and his PhD in 1949 at Harvard. Kuhn credits his three years as a Harvard Junior Fellow for his insight into the theory of scientific thought. From 1948 to 1956 he taught the history of science at Harvard. He transferred to University of California, Berkeley and taught in both the philosophy and history departments. Kuhn interviewed Niels Bohr just before Bohr's death. While he was at Berkeley he published The Structure of Scientific Thought. In it he introduced the controversial idea that the subjective worldview of the investigator influences and colors his scientific interpretation. He stated that the history of scientific progress is not linear but that it undergoes periodic revolutions in which a field of study is abruptly transformed. In 1964 he became the M.Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. From 1979 to 1991 he was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kuhn's work has had enormous impact in several fields. In the philosophy of science it expanded the vocabulary to encompass the everyday workings of science. In sociology, he is a force behind the post Mertonian Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. He work also influenced the Humanities and was used to distinguish between historical and scientific communities and between political and religious groups.
7992	dbpedia	0	54	https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/january-february-2008-25-ideas-on-the-verge/groupthink/	en	Cal Alumni Association	https://alumni.berkeley.…/groupthink.jpeg	https://alumni.berkeley.…/groupthink.jpeg	[ "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/mobile-menu.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/logo.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/logo.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/Search.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/give-back-menu_desktop.png", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/give-back-menu_mobile.png", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/SHS_1174479760_Interlaken-scaled.jpg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/COVER_SS24_FINAL_CV1-1.pdf.jpg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/mobile-close.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/give-back-menu_desktop.png", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/give-back-menu_mobile.png", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/SHS_1174479760_Interlaken-scaled.jpg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/COVER_SS24_FINAL_CV1-1.pdf.jpg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/categories-hamburger.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/california.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/california.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/Search.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/Facebook.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/Twitter.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/Linkedin.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/Email-Share.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/groupthink.jpeg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/Facebook.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/Twitter.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/Linkedin.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/themes/calalumni/images/Email-Share.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/fb-blue.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/twitter-blue.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/insta-blue.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/youtube-blue.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/default-post-image-1024x673.jpg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/thingsthatcamefromberkcov-1024x455.jpg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/vines.jpeg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/boa-card-600-300x197.png", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/amba-logo-600-300x99.png", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/peets-logo-600-300x77.png", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BMO-logo-300x125.png", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/pepsi-logo-300x300.png", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Web-1456x180-1.png", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Bank-of-America-300x100-1.png", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/CAA_Logo_White.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/fb.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Twitter.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Instagram.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/YouTube.svg", "https://alumni.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/LinkedIn.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2009-09-16T20:17:13+00:00	In an era of technological triumph, a physicist-turned-philosopher dared to argue that science routinely rewards conformists and rejects real innovators. The intellectual revolution he sparked is still being fought today. Thomas S. Kuhn transformed the way we think about science, revealing it as a messier, less logical, and occasionally more sordid process than your high school […]	en	https://alumni.berkeley.…n_icon-32x32.png	Cal Alumni Association	https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/january-february-2008-25-ideas-on-the-verge/groupthink/	In an era of technological triumph, a physicist-turned-philosopher dared to argue that science routinely rewards conformists and rejects real innovators. The intellectual revolution he sparked is still being fought today. Thomas S. Kuhn transformed the way we think about science, revealing it as a messier, less logical, and occasionally more sordid process than your high school science teacher might have admitted. One of the terms Kuhn used to describe scientific history, “paradigm shift,” has become so integrated into the popular vernacular that, a while back, singer Rosanne Cash announced she’d experienced a “paradigm shift” in her singing. But Kuhn’s ideas are often misunderstood, even on university campuses. This is unfortunate, and for very practical reasons. In our era, science is widely viewed by corporations, governments, and the public as the solution to a panoply of problems, including global crises such as climate change. If society is betting planetary survival on the ingenuity of Ph.D.s and their grad students, we can’t afford to bet recklessly. We need to be aware not only of scientists’ strengths but also of their limitations. Kuhn’s precautions about the limits of the scientific enterprise—including the self-deceptions of scientific reasoning and the transience of seemingly eternal scientific belief systems—are timely. It’s a good time to dust off our old copies of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a screaming-pink paperback perhaps long ago relegated to a cardboard box in the basement alongside Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, and other mildewed standard bearers of 1960s rebellion. Since before the days of Benjamin Franklin, Americans have revered science and invention. By the dawn of the space age, which coincided with Kuhn’s early academic career, that reverence had turned to worship. Stirred by press hype over the Mercury astronauts, many Americans envisioned science as the celestial path to utopian futures on Earth and in the heavens. But in 1962, the year John Glenn soared starward, Kuhn, a physicist turned Berkeley professor of science history and philosophy, wrote Structure, which cooly and unsentimentally called such dreams into question. Kuhn didn’t treat scientists (as journalists usually did) as saints, sinners, or seers whose “scientific method” magically enabled extraordinary feats. Rather, he treated them as people whose professional thinking and practice are as imperfect and hidebound as anyone’s. He dissected historical episodes of scientific revolutions (what he dubbed “paradigm shifts”) just as a sociologist might examine the restructuring of power relations within an urban street gang, or as an anthropologist might study changes in the faunal classificatory schemes of central Asian nomads. In an era when writers typically depicted science as a grand adventure brimming with potential for both good and evil, Kuhn dared to make everyday “normal science” (his term) seem narrow-minded and mundane, albeit essential. Kuhn’s “normal” scientists are what in corporations would be called “company men.” They’re loyal to the reigning scientific paradigm. He defined paradigm a bit vaguely as the unwritten intellectual manifesto of a scientific specialty such as astrophysics, chemistry, or biology. A paradigm is a collage of both tangibles and intangibles—what the relevant specialists agree are appropriate research techniques and instruments (say, electron microscopes); symbolic generalizations (E=mc²); exemplary practices (famous scientific achievements that inspire and guide future research); epistemic values (how to distinguish between credible theories and dubious ones); and certain metaphysical assumptions about nature (the large-scale homogeneity of the universe). Normal scientists are problem solvers and paper shufflers, not revolutionaries. They don’t challenge the paradigm as Galileo and Darwin challenged traditional astronomy and biology. Kuhn’s normal scientists rarely consider alternative paradigms, even when the orthodox paradigm seems mortally stricken. And because they work so hard to avoid a scientific revolution, the revolution when it finally arrives comes suddenly and catastrophically. It’s like a dam that holds back the slowly rising waters of a lake: When the dam breaks, everything below is flooded. Many scientists praised Structure. Long before Hiroshima, they had become accustomed to being compared to Faust, Prometheus, and Dr. Frankenstein. Kuhn depicted the intellectual struggles of scientists as they actually lived them, not as Hollywood romanticized or demonized them—and they liked that. Four decades later, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould vividly recalled the day in the early 1960s when a colleague ran up to him and exclaimed, “You just have to read this book right away.” Other scientists were upset. That same year, 1962, brought both Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring, which ignited the environmentalist crusade, and the Cuban nuclear missile crisis, which almost wiped out civilization. Both developments indicated science had become an out-of-control juggernaut that threatened human survival. In some respects, Structure cut even deeper. Kuhn made most scientists’ daily intellectual toil sound dull, like that of accountants or filing clerks. That hurt. Structure has been called irrationalist, nihilistic, and antiscientific. It is none of these things. In fact, Kuhn griped that his book inspired many people to dabble in the study of science history—among them general historians, literary theorists, postmodern philosophers, and others who lacked what he regarded as the necessary technical training in science. Still, Structure made intellectual history by challenging science’s boldest claim: that it is the surest route to “progress” and “truth.” By this, Kuhn didn’t mean that there are necessarily better routes, such as religion (he was an atheist). He meant that science is a far bumpier road than is popularly assumed and that its most hyped gifts, of progress and truth, are often more tawdry than they appear, like a Tinsel Town façade of the Taj Mahal. Kuhn’s attitude toward science echoed Churchill’s famously sardonic remark about democracy being the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried. Reading Kuhn, one gets the impression that science is the worst epistemology in the world, except for all the others. Thomas Kuhn was born in 1922 in Cincinnati to a well-educated, well-heeled, and secular Jewish family. He was raised in New York City and educated at left-leaning progressive schools. During the Great Depression, he was an adolescent radical and pacifist. A newspaper reported one of his speeches, which he concluded with the plea, “Let the Philippines go.” Later he became a Harvard student with broad cultural tastes. Before his freshman year, he considered becoming a mathematician; its grand abstractions appealed to his philosophical side. But on the advice of his father, a failed corporate executive who wanted to ensure his son was employable, Kuhn halfheartedly majored in physics. The headlines of the 1930s and 1940s were full of exciting news about physics, especially Einstein and Bohr’s quasi-philosophical clashes over the nature of quantum reality. But Kuhn’s physics education from 1940 to 1943 (he graduated early) concentrated heavily on electronics, because radar experts were desperately needed on the World War II battlefront. He entered the war as a civilian advisor on radar countermeasures, to U.S. forces in England, Germany, and France, and was present at the liberation of Paris in August 1944. When the war in Europe ended, Kuhn returned to Harvard and earned his doctorate in a rather uninteresting backwater of solid-state physics. Then he quit physics forever. In later years he looked back on his Harvard education with some resentment; he felt a little cheated. Kuhn instead became a teacher of science history in Harvard’s fledgling General Education program, where, over the next decade, he quietly began rethinking traditional conceptions of science and how it works. In 1957, the same year the Soviets launched Sputnik and the space age, he wrote his first book, The Copernican Revolution. In it he reassessed an earlier “space” revolution: the proposal of Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 that the Sun, not Earth, is central in our planetary system. According to Kuhn, Copernicus’s scientific revolution was inspired partly by his nonscientific concerns, specifically his metaphysical, aesthetic, and religious values. Kuhn’s book won praise, most warmly from Scientific American. Ironically, the book’s subtly demystifying view of science appeared in the same year that the Soviet Union and United States were billing their “space race” as a peaceful competition for scientific knowledge, when in fact it was largely propelled by the ideological and geopolitical tussles of the Cold War. To scientists, Kuhn’s depiction of them was hardly news. They knew their own human frailties all too well. But Kuhn’s insight came as a startling revelation to the general public, especially the baby boomers who were beginning to jam college classrooms. Their generation had been hypnotized by the parade of scientific wonders shimmering on the phosphorescent TV screens in their family living rooms, ranging from gushing press coverage of the astronauts to Walt Disney “documentaries” such as Our Friend the Atom. To childish eyes of the 1950s (mine among them), such marvels symbolized science in all its glory and promise. Long before those marvels curdled—before commercial nuclear reactors began to melt down, before we turned the Moon into a junkyard and then abandoned it—Kuhn’s readers were invited to wonder: Were the marvels a mirage? In 1956, Kuhn left Harvard for California after being vigorously championed by the chair of Berkeley’s philosophy department at the time, Stephen Pepper. A distinguished philosopher of aesthetics, Pepper hired Kuhn out of fear that American philosophy departments—among them, Berkeley’s—were being invaded by the “logical positivist” movement. He believed Kuhn would counterbalance the trend. Logical positivism’s cardinal traits included its desire to make philosophy more “scientific” and to dissolve philosophical debates over metaphysics, which positivists viewed as empty squabbles caused by the misuse of words. Pepper apparently figured he could counter positivist influence within the department by hiring a historian of science who had strong scientific credentials and yet was skeptical about key aspects of the positivistic agenda. Kuhn’s time at Berkeley was a mixed blessing. He and his family loved the community and made many friends, thanks considerably to his wife Kathryn’s skill at throwing dinner parties. He enjoyed a new sense of prestige (likely owing much to the publication of the highly praised The Copernican Revolution and to Pepper’s personal enthusiasm for him) that no doubt encouraged him in writing Structure. On the other hand, there were emotional tensions between Kuhn and his allies, as well as his critics, in the history and philosophy departments. In both departments, there were certain scholars who didn’t find what Kuhn was doing to be particularly interesting. By the time he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, Kuhn had become bolder in his critique. Unlike the Copernicus book, Structure made no pretense to celebrate scientific accomplishments of yesteryear. It was as unsentimental as a coroner’s report. Surveying the history of science, it depicted most scientists, even some of the greatest ones, as intellectual dogmatists. Normal scientists, he argued, cling to pet scientific concepts as loyally as religious fanatics cling to a crucifix, and they experience conversions akin to Paul’s epiphany en route to Damascus. Yet their day-to-day work is unromantic. Theirs is a “mopping up” job; that is, they spend much of their time trying to explain away the residual observational anomalies that afflict even the most successful paradigm. “Mopping up” is a janitorial analogy, and Kuhn used it deliberately. At Harvard, he had narrowly avoided becoming one such epistemic janitor himself, along with the hundreds of other physicists who flooded the nation’s shiny new labs after the war. Most of them weren’t destined to become Einsteins or Bohrs who would shatter paradigms. Their daily task was to clean up the daily messes, the anomalous observations and technical disagreements. They typically approached observational anomalies as if they were “puzzles”—mysteries that cannot immediately be explained in terms of the paradigm but that (normal scientists are sure) can assuredly be explained in terms of the paradigm, at least if they tried hard enough. That’s why Kuhn compared normal science “puzzle solving” to crossword puzzles, which are also assumed to have potentially knowable solutions. The trick is to figure out what those solutions are, without tinkering with the core assumptions of the paradigm. If a normal scientist succeeds at his Sisyphean tasks, then he’ll enjoy an honorable career and perhaps attain a certain minor fame, capped by a festschrift and a two-column obit in The New York Times. No Nobel Prize, but no dishonor, either. If he fails to explain away the anomalies—or, worse, if he suggests they threaten the orthodox paradigm—then his career will be in jeopardy. His failure, Kuhn emphasized, will be blamed on him and on his presumed ineptitude, not on the paradigm itself. Structure inspired a revolution in the scholarly study of science. That revolution involved a remarkably diverse and disunited army of researchers, including ex-scientists, historians, philosophers, sociologists of knowledge, cultural anthropologists, linguistic theorists, neuroscientists, feminist theorists, literary and rhetorical analysts, and many other scholars. Their reassessment of science’s nature, dynamics, and social contexts is still ongoing; it constitutes an incomplete paradigm shift in academia. (In the 1980s and 1990s, their work upset certain physicists, who accused the post-Kuhnian scholars of being anti-science. The result was the “Science Wars” brouhaha that climaxed in 1996 with physicist Alan Sokal’s notorious hoaxing of a postmodernist journal.) Structure even attracted a pop following. Kuhn became (to quote Randall Collins) “the darling of student Marxists and deconstructionists.” He also inspired, to his regret, countless would-be rebels, from LSD promoters to New Age cultists to UFO investigators. Ironically, on the eve of Structure‘s publication, Berkeley’s senior philosophers denied Kuhn’s bid for full professorial status in the most overt way—by voting to eject him from the department altogether. (Pepper had retired in 1958.) Kuhn had always yearned to be accepted as a philosopher; decades later, he recalled the vote as the worst event of his life. Still, he stayed on the Berkeley history faculty for three more years before he, Kay, and their three children left for Princeton in mid-1964. By the time his marriage to Kay fell apart in 1978, Kuhn had retreated inward. To some, he was crotchety and abrasive. Many of his fans, including students and colleagues, were surprised and hurt by his testy reaction to their admiration. Initially he welcomed their enthusiasm, but as the years passed and his enemies grew harsher, he started blaming his problems on his acolytes. He began to drive them away, sometimes brutally. Kuhn often unfairly accused people of misinterpreting his work, treating them instead as interlopers on his turf. As a teacher Kuhn could be immensely inspiring, but also ruthless. Some ex-students recall him fondly, others bitterly. His work helped to inspire major academic innovations, but as he grew older, he generally viewed these with indifference or incomprehension. When the end came in 1996—he died of cancer a few years after retiring—his passing was widely covered in the media, even in unlikely places such as The New Yorker and The Economist. Yet in a very real sense, he died alone, a reluctant guru with countless admirers and zero apostles. Today, over 40 years after the publication of Structure, Kuhn’s insights remain relevant. His work offers no formula for resolving poisonous scientific controversies, but it does suggest useful new methods for thinking about them. Among Structure‘s lessons are these: Scientists (like all people) tend to see what they expect to see. Thus they might mistake an anomalous observation for a familiar phenomenon, when in fact it’s the omen of a paradigm shift. Scientists (again, like all people) consciously or unconsciously “forget” or distort their past paradigmatic faiths in order to get on with the business of building a new one. Thus, in experiencing a paradigm shift, they “lose” knowledge as well as gain it because they abandon as irrelevant some questions that, in fact, remain urgent. Scientists (ditto) often ridicule and ruin anyone who challenges the reigning paradigm. Their “normal science” faith blinds them to alternative ways of understanding reality. And paradigm shifts, which begin as intellectual liberations, end as smug dogmatisms and barriers to intellectual innovation. Laypeople tend to think a “paradigm” is a purely conceptual, abstract thing—an especially grandiose scientific theory, or a mental nebulosity akin to Kant’s “categories” or Freud’s “id” or Foucault’s epistème. In fact, a paradigm is much more concrete than these legendary vapors. One reason Kuhn’s thesis inspired sociologists and anthropologists is that a paradigm has many tangible, quantifiable, down-to-earth features. You can see them in a way that you can’t “see” a theory. A paradigm involves flesh-and-blood scientific specialists who work at certain institutions, use certain instrumental tools, swear by specific forms of lab practice and methodology, recognize fellow specialists, communicate their findings via approved means—such as doctoral dissertations, tenure committees, and peer-reviewed journals—and receive funding from specific (often self-interested) sources. In other words, a paradigm is more than a Really Big Idea; it is also often physically embodied in a Really Big Institution. And the paradigm’s intellectual fate may well be decided less by what is “scientific” than by what serves the needs of the institution. Kuhn depicted normal sciences as prone to become dogmatisms, even monomaniacal juggernauts. (Some would suggest “string theory” is a modern-day example of such a juggernaut. It has taken over many physics departments, though there’s not a shred of experimental evidence in its favor after several decades of research.) History, as well as sociopsychological experiments, suggest that such intellectual rigidification—”groupthink,” to borrow a non-Kuhnian term—is especially likely to occur within large, well-funded, and powerful institutions. True, normal scientists need not work for giant institutions to be vulnerable to groupthink. But it seems an especially likely danger in an institution with immensely more at stake than scientific truth—including money, careers, expensive gadgets, and institutional pride. Consider, for example, the international effort to develop commercial thermonuclear fusion, an endeavor that has consumed many billions of dollars over the last half-century. Commercially, it has led nowhere. Can we honestly say it owes its survival purely to its allure, and not a whit to the political and fund-raising agility of fusion’s legions of normal scientists? Although his ideas inspired an intellectual revolution, Kuhn, isolated in his smoke-filled office, was a reluctant revolutionary. Dismayed by accusations that he was an “irrationalist” and a “nihilist,” Kuhn reassured colleagues that he didn’t really want to overturn the scientific applecart. Although initially poignant, his persistent hand-wringing over his legacy became seriocomic. One of his cruelest detractors compared him to Peter Sellers’s character Chance the Gardener, the dim-witted protagonist of Being There, who gains fame because others mistake his inane remarks for profundities. Kuhn’s most detailed historical studies concentrate on three men who were themselves reluctant revolutionaries. Two were Max Planck and Albert Einstein, who helped initiate the quantum physics revolution in 1900–1910 but opposed some of its weirder theoretical implications. The third scientist was Copernicus. In 1543, Copernicus reassured those discomfited by De revolutionibus orbium coelestium that it was nothing to lose sleep over. By moving Earth from the center of the universe to an orbit about 90 million miles from the Sun, he wasn’t undermining humanity’s importance in the Christian cosmology, because the distance from Earth to the Sun was still “nothing in particular when compared to [the distance] to the fixed stars.” As we now know, of course, he was at best a lousy prophet and at worst disingenuous. The effect of Copernicus’s revolution was to be far more devastating, not only scientifically, but culturally. Displacement of Earth from its central position made nonsense of contemporary theories of motion. This in turn helped to inspire the more sweeping intellectual revolution of Galileo, which would weaken the scientific authority of the Church (as well as its moral stature, thanks to the Inquisition’s prosecution of the astronomer). Next stop: modernity and its secular, satellite-filled, godless skies. With time, Kuhn’s Structure might come to be viewed in the same way: as the little spark that lit the inferno. His sardonic manifesto triggered an intellectual revolution far bigger than anything he expected or wanted. It was the first shot fired in a scholarly war still raging today to demythologize that marvelous but much-mythologized subject, science.
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Kuhn", "Stefano Gattei (Redattore)", "James Conant (Editor)", "John Haugeland (Editor)", "José Roma Feito (Translator)", "Manuel Cruz (Series Editor)", "Bojana Mladenovic (Editor)" ]	null	About Thomas S. Kuhn: American historian and philosopher of science, a leading contributor to the change of focus in the philosophy and sociology of scie...				https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4735497.Thomas_S_Kuhn	The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 4.03 avg rating — 27,711 ratings — published 1962 — 188 editions The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought 4.12 avg rating — 820 ratings — published 1957 — 53 editions The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change 4.03 avg rating — 145 ratings — published 1977 — 19 editions The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview by James Conant (Editor), John Haugeland (Editor) 4.04 avg rating — 121 ratings — published 1993 — 10 editions Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 4.30 avg rating — 47 ratings — published 1978 — 6 editions ¿Qué son las revoluciones científicas? y otros ensayos by Manuel Cruz (Series Editor) 3.68 avg rating — 25 ratings — published 1987 The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science 3.45 avg rating — 11 ratings — published 1992 Sources for History of Quantum Physics 3.75 avg rating — 8 ratings — 2 editions The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science by Bojana Mladenovic (Editor) 4.14 avg rating — 7 ratings — 5 editions
7992	dbpedia	3	17	https://www.famousscientists.org/thomas-kuhn/	en	Biography, Facts and Pictures	https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/themes/genesis-child/images/favicon.ico	https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/themes/genesis-child/images/favicon.ico	[ "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/thomas-kuhn.png", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-thomas-kuhn.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/de-gaulle-paris.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-thomas-kuhn.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-thomas-kuhn.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-thomas-kuhn.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-thomas-kuhn.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pythagoras-irrational-triangle-150x150.png", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-thomas-kuhn.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-ernst-mayer1.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-thomas-kuhn.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/150-karl-popper-100x100.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/150-aristotle-100x100.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/150-nicolaus-copernicus-100x100.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/150-claudius-ptolemy-100x100.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2017-06-12T06:14:12-05:00	Lived 1922 – 1996. Thomas Kuhn introduced the paradigm shift into our language and culture. His initial impulse to do so came when, although a physicist, he could not understand the physics of Aristotle from over two millennia earlier. He realized that Galileo and Newton had built an entirely new intellectual framework within which the	en	https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/themes/genesis-child/images/favicon.ico		https://www.famousscientists.org/thomas-kuhn/	Lived 1922 – 1996. Thomas Kuhn introduced the paradigm shift into our language and culture. His initial impulse to do so came when, although a physicist, he could not understand the physics of Aristotle from over two millennia earlier. He realized that Galileo and Newton had built an entirely new intellectual framework within which the physics of motion was contained. Aristotle had worked within the confines of an earlier framework, alien to modern minds. Kuhn described the change of intellectual frameworks within which facts are interpreted as a paradigm shift. Advertisements Beginnings Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA into an affluent family. His parents called him Tom. His younger brother Roger was born three years later. Tom’s father, Samuel Louis Kuhn, was a Cincinnati-born industrial engineer and investment consultant. A graduate of Harvard and MIT, he had fought in World War 1. Tom’s mother, Minette Kuhn (née Strook), came from a wealthy New York family. A graduate of Vassar College, she wrote unpaid articles for progressive organizations, worked as a freelance editor, and was a patron of the arts. Both of Tom’s parents were active in left-wing politics and both were of Jewish descent, although neither of them practiced their religion. When Tom was a few months old, the family moved to New York. School From kindergarten through fifth grade, Tom was educated at Lincoln School, a private progressive school in Manhattan where independent thinking rather than learning facts and subjects was practiced. His father grew impatient when, age seven, his son could still not read or write. With a little coaching from his father, however, Tom was soon reading. The family moved 40 miles north to the small town of Croton-on-Hudson where, once again, Tom attended a progressive private school – Hessian Hills School. It was here that, in sixth through ninth grade, he learned to love mathematics. Influenced by radical teachers, he also hoped to join the leftist American Student Union. Before joining it, members had to swear an oath never to fight for America. After agonizing over this, and talking to his father, he decided he could not sign. He left Hessian Hills in 1937. For tenth grade, Tom moved to Solebury School, a private boarding school in Solebury Township, Pennsylvania. His final school was another private boarding school, Taft School, in Watertown, Conneticut. A straight-A student, he was admitted to Harvard University, his father’s alma mater. He believed this was a great honor, and it was only years later he learned that nearly everyone who applied when he did was admitted to Harvard. He knew he would eventually have to make a choice between majoring in Mathematics or Physics. His father told him it would be easier to get a job as a physicist, so even before leaving for Harvard, Tom decided he would major in Physics. Undergraduate at Harvard Arriving in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the fall of 1940, 18-year-old Tom Kuhn experienced a happy improvement in his social life. In his final prep school years, he had started to feel like an outsider looking in. His frequent moves between high schools must have been unsettling. At Harvard, he felt like he belonged. However, physics proved harder than he expected, and he scored a C in his first exam. Worried, he asked a professor if he had any future in the subject. The professor told Kuhn he needed to spend time plowing through more problems, making sure he could do them. Kuhn took the advice and scored A at the end of his freshman year. In his sophomore year, America entered World War 2. Kuhn decided to speed up his degree by attending classes in summer. He graduated with a BS in Physics summa cum laude (with highest honor) in 1943. In addition to studying Physics, he spent his final year as head of the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson, the college newspaper. War Work In the summer of 1943, Kuhn joined the Radio Research Laboratory’s theoretical group. Based at Harvard, his group was tasked with devising countermeasures against enemy radar. He was soon sent to work in a laboratory in the United Kingdom. Later he traveled with a Royal Air Force officer to France for a few weeks to study recently captured German radar installations, then carried on into Germany itself. Back to Harvard Kuhn returned to Harvard after the war in Europe ended and graduated with a master’s degree in Physics in 1946 and doctorate in 1949. His PhD thesis was The Cohesive Energy of Monovalent Metals as a Function of the Atomic Quantum Defects. Even before he returned to America, his enthusiasm for physics had been dwindling. He continued studying it though, because it was the most convenient way for him to get a doctorate. Making Sense of Absurdity As a matter of fact, Kuhn was increasingly fascinated by philosophy, believing that in his personal search for ‘Truth’ it offered better prospects than physics. In 1947, he was invited to deliver a History of Science course for undergraduates at Harvard. He had an epiphany while trying to make sense of the ideas of motion described by Aristotle in his Physics, ideas that had persisted from 350 BC – 1600 AD. Kuhn realized he could not understand Aristotle’s ideas of motion because his modern physics education was getting in the way. Kuhn was studying Aristotle’s ideas from the perspective of a physicist familiar with Isaac Newton’s much later ideas. When Kuhn took account of the underlying science and philosophy of the Ancient Greeks, Aristotle’s Physics began to make much more sense. History of Science In the fall of 1948, while still working on his physics doctorate, Kuhn embarked on a three-year program as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. With no teaching duties, he focused entirely on developing his ideas as a science historian and philosopher. He became preoccupied with understanding the mechanisms of scientific progress; he saw this as a more fruitful approach than following conventional historical timelines and worrying about discovery dates. As a former physicist, he observed that science textbooks at introductory level tended to present their subjects in a highly polished way, as indisputable facts; moreover, the creative processes that produce scientific discoveries were ignored in these books. At the end of his fellowship, Harvard appointed Kuhn as an instructor, teaching general courses. A year later, he was promoted to assistant professor. He began giving an advanced undergraduate History of Science course looking at the development of mechanics from Aristotle to Newton. He enjoyed this immensely. Kuhn’s Take on Nicolaus Copernicus’ Revolution One of the courses Kuhn offered students was The Copernican Revolution, which he used as the basis for his first book, published in 1957. He scrutinized Nicolaus Copernicus’s famous book De revolutionibus with its bold claim that the earth orbits the sun. Kuhn came to the conclusion that De revolutionibus was: “a revolution-making rather than a revolutionary text.” He claimed, with some justification, that Copernicus’s model was no more accurate and no simpler in its portrayal of heavenly bodies than the previous system devised by Claudius Ptolemy 1,400 years earlier. Kuhn believed Copernicus’s model was ultimately preferred because it was more pleasing to its audience – in other words for aesthetic reasons rather than scientific reasons. Certainly the fact that in Copernicus’s model there was no need for Ptolemy’s equant was aesthetically appealing. (The equant was an extremely clever mathematical improvisation Ptolemy devised to make his theory of planetary movements work.) Scholars such as Richard Hall have pointed out that Copernicus’s model actually does have some scientific advantages over Ptolemy’s, such as those concerning the maximum elongation of Venus and Mercury, the explanation of retrograde motion, and the frequency of retrogressions. Written for a general rather than a narrow specialist readership, Kuhn’s book has proven to be a keeper. The copy in front of me is from the twenty-fourth printing in 2003. Berkeley & the Center for Advanced Study In 1956, Harvard had still not offered Kuhn tenure. He accepted an offer from the University of California at Berkeley, where he became an assistant professor in both the Philosophy and History Departments. In 1958, he was promoted to associate professor and given tenure. In the fall of that year, he began a one-year fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study. It was here he wrote a significant part of his most influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1961, he was promoted to full professor of the History of Science at Berkeley. This actually infuriated him, because he wanted to be a professor of Philosophy. In the end, however, he agreed to accept the position in History. The Paradigm Shift The concept of the paradigm shift made Kuhn’s name. The term became widely used in all disciplines, not just science. Kuhn first described the paradigm shift in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The concept had been in his mind for many years, starting when he asked himself how an intelligent man like Aristotle could have harbored absurd ideas about motion. It dawned on him that the framework of science in which Aristotle interpreted facts was entirely different from the framework of science (or to be more specific, the framework of basic mechanics) we use today, courtesy of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. The change of framework was the paradigm shift. Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus provided Kuhn with another example of a paradigm shift. Before De revolutionibus, all facts were interpreted within a framework that said our planet lies at the center of the universe. Within a few decades, all facts were being interpreted within a new framework, which said the earth is actually a planet orbiting the sun. Normal Science After a paradigm shift has taken place, Kuhn said, scientists can begin building up facts again, perhaps studying different problems and searching for facts in different places suggested by the new paradigm. He described this period between paradigm shifts as normal science or puzzle solving. Incommensurability Kuhn also discussed the concept of incommensurability. The word itself is not a common one. Ancient Greeks described a triangle whose hypotenuse’s length is an irrational number as incommensurable. While a whole number such as 1 and a fraction such as 1/3 are on a common scale (you need three of one to exactly equal the other) there is no common scale between a whole number and an irrational number like √2. Kuhn used the word incommensurable to describe paradigms that represent wholly different world views of the same subject – for example, the mechanics of Aristotle vs Newton, which differ so drastically that there is little common ground between them. Princeton and MIT In 1964, Kuhn moved to Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979, he became Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Impact of Kuhn’s Work on Science Most scientists are only vaguely aware of Kuhn’s work, although like most people are familiar with the idea of a paradigm shift. Humanities students are generally more familiar Kuhn’s work. Some Personal Details and the End By ancestry Kuhn was Jewish. By choice he was an agnostic. While studying for his PhD, Kuhn became rather isolated from other people, repeating the experience of his final high school years. Working in an almost all-male setting, he worried his mother by not dating women. He agreed to undergo psychoanalysis. Looking back on the experience, he said he hated the psychiatrist, who would fall asleep during sessions. The psychoanalysis ended because the psychiatrist left town and Kuhn got married. He married Kathryn Muhs in 1948. His wife, like his mother, was a graduate of Vassar College. She typed his PhD thesis. They had two daughters and a son – Sarah, Elizabeth, and Nathaniel. The couple divorced in 1978. In 1981, age 59, Kuhn married Jehane Barton Burns. He retired from MIT in 1991, age 69. Thomas Kuhn died, age 73, of cancer on June 17, 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had been suffering from throat and lung cancer for two years. Advertisements Author of this page: The Doc © All rights reserved. Cite this Page Please use the following MLA compliant citation: "Thomas Kuhn." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 12 Jun. 2017. Web. <www.famousscientists.org/thomas-kuhn/>. Published by FamousScientists.org Further Reading Thomas S. Kuhn The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought Harvard University Press, 1957 Richard J. Hall Kuhn and the Copernican Revolution British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 21 No. 2: pp. 196-197, 1970
7992	dbpedia	0	15	https://science.jrank.org/pages/10602/Paradigm-THOMAS-KUHN.html	en	Paradigm - Thomas Kuhn			[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on 18 July 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1943 with a bachelor's degree in physics, and after some work in the government Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, he returned to Harvard for his master's and doctoral degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949. He remained at Harvard until 1956 teaching in the Department of the History of Science that had just been created by his mentor James Conant, who aided his transition from theoretical physics to the history and philosophy of science. Kuhn next joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he developed the idea for his most influential book. In 1964 he moved to Princeton, where he was the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. Kuhn returned to Boston to complete his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as professor of philosophy and history of science from 1979 to 1983 and the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy from 1983 until 1991. Kuhn was the author or coauthor of five books and scores of articles on the philosophy and history of science. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954–1955, the winner of the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science in 1982, and the holder of honorary degrees from many institutions, among them the University of Notre Dame, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, the University of Padua, and the University of Athens. Kuhn suffered from cancer during the last years of his life and died in 1996.
7992	dbpedia	2	6	https://www.famousscientists.org/thomas-kuhn/	en	Biography, Facts and Pictures	https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/themes/genesis-child/images/favicon.ico	https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/themes/genesis-child/images/favicon.ico	[ "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/thomas-kuhn.png", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-thomas-kuhn.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/de-gaulle-paris.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-thomas-kuhn.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-thomas-kuhn.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-thomas-kuhn.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-thomas-kuhn.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pythagoras-irrational-triangle-150x150.png", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-thomas-kuhn.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-ernst-mayer1.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/images1/100-thomas-kuhn.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/150-karl-popper-100x100.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/150-aristotle-100x100.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/150-nicolaus-copernicus-100x100.jpg", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif", "https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/150-claudius-ptolemy-100x100.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2017-06-12T06:14:12-05:00	Lived 1922 – 1996. Thomas Kuhn introduced the paradigm shift into our language and culture. His initial impulse to do so came when, although a physicist, he could not understand the physics of Aristotle from over two millennia earlier. He realized that Galileo and Newton had built an entirely new intellectual framework within which the	en	https://www.famousscientists.org/fs/wp-content/themes/genesis-child/images/favicon.ico		https://www.famousscientists.org/thomas-kuhn/	Lived 1922 – 1996. Thomas Kuhn introduced the paradigm shift into our language and culture. His initial impulse to do so came when, although a physicist, he could not understand the physics of Aristotle from over two millennia earlier. He realized that Galileo and Newton had built an entirely new intellectual framework within which the physics of motion was contained. Aristotle had worked within the confines of an earlier framework, alien to modern minds. Kuhn described the change of intellectual frameworks within which facts are interpreted as a paradigm shift. Advertisements Beginnings Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA into an affluent family. His parents called him Tom. His younger brother Roger was born three years later. Tom’s father, Samuel Louis Kuhn, was a Cincinnati-born industrial engineer and investment consultant. A graduate of Harvard and MIT, he had fought in World War 1. Tom’s mother, Minette Kuhn (née Strook), came from a wealthy New York family. A graduate of Vassar College, she wrote unpaid articles for progressive organizations, worked as a freelance editor, and was a patron of the arts. Both of Tom’s parents were active in left-wing politics and both were of Jewish descent, although neither of them practiced their religion. When Tom was a few months old, the family moved to New York. School From kindergarten through fifth grade, Tom was educated at Lincoln School, a private progressive school in Manhattan where independent thinking rather than learning facts and subjects was practiced. His father grew impatient when, age seven, his son could still not read or write. With a little coaching from his father, however, Tom was soon reading. The family moved 40 miles north to the small town of Croton-on-Hudson where, once again, Tom attended a progressive private school – Hessian Hills School. It was here that, in sixth through ninth grade, he learned to love mathematics. Influenced by radical teachers, he also hoped to join the leftist American Student Union. Before joining it, members had to swear an oath never to fight for America. After agonizing over this, and talking to his father, he decided he could not sign. He left Hessian Hills in 1937. For tenth grade, Tom moved to Solebury School, a private boarding school in Solebury Township, Pennsylvania. His final school was another private boarding school, Taft School, in Watertown, Conneticut. A straight-A student, he was admitted to Harvard University, his father’s alma mater. He believed this was a great honor, and it was only years later he learned that nearly everyone who applied when he did was admitted to Harvard. He knew he would eventually have to make a choice between majoring in Mathematics or Physics. His father told him it would be easier to get a job as a physicist, so even before leaving for Harvard, Tom decided he would major in Physics. Undergraduate at Harvard Arriving in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the fall of 1940, 18-year-old Tom Kuhn experienced a happy improvement in his social life. In his final prep school years, he had started to feel like an outsider looking in. His frequent moves between high schools must have been unsettling. At Harvard, he felt like he belonged. However, physics proved harder than he expected, and he scored a C in his first exam. Worried, he asked a professor if he had any future in the subject. The professor told Kuhn he needed to spend time plowing through more problems, making sure he could do them. Kuhn took the advice and scored A at the end of his freshman year. In his sophomore year, America entered World War 2. Kuhn decided to speed up his degree by attending classes in summer. He graduated with a BS in Physics summa cum laude (with highest honor) in 1943. In addition to studying Physics, he spent his final year as head of the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson, the college newspaper. War Work In the summer of 1943, Kuhn joined the Radio Research Laboratory’s theoretical group. Based at Harvard, his group was tasked with devising countermeasures against enemy radar. He was soon sent to work in a laboratory in the United Kingdom. Later he traveled with a Royal Air Force officer to France for a few weeks to study recently captured German radar installations, then carried on into Germany itself. Back to Harvard Kuhn returned to Harvard after the war in Europe ended and graduated with a master’s degree in Physics in 1946 and doctorate in 1949. His PhD thesis was The Cohesive Energy of Monovalent Metals as a Function of the Atomic Quantum Defects. Even before he returned to America, his enthusiasm for physics had been dwindling. He continued studying it though, because it was the most convenient way for him to get a doctorate. Making Sense of Absurdity As a matter of fact, Kuhn was increasingly fascinated by philosophy, believing that in his personal search for ‘Truth’ it offered better prospects than physics. In 1947, he was invited to deliver a History of Science course for undergraduates at Harvard. He had an epiphany while trying to make sense of the ideas of motion described by Aristotle in his Physics, ideas that had persisted from 350 BC – 1600 AD. Kuhn realized he could not understand Aristotle’s ideas of motion because his modern physics education was getting in the way. Kuhn was studying Aristotle’s ideas from the perspective of a physicist familiar with Isaac Newton’s much later ideas. When Kuhn took account of the underlying science and philosophy of the Ancient Greeks, Aristotle’s Physics began to make much more sense. History of Science In the fall of 1948, while still working on his physics doctorate, Kuhn embarked on a three-year program as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. With no teaching duties, he focused entirely on developing his ideas as a science historian and philosopher. He became preoccupied with understanding the mechanisms of scientific progress; he saw this as a more fruitful approach than following conventional historical timelines and worrying about discovery dates. As a former physicist, he observed that science textbooks at introductory level tended to present their subjects in a highly polished way, as indisputable facts; moreover, the creative processes that produce scientific discoveries were ignored in these books. At the end of his fellowship, Harvard appointed Kuhn as an instructor, teaching general courses. A year later, he was promoted to assistant professor. He began giving an advanced undergraduate History of Science course looking at the development of mechanics from Aristotle to Newton. He enjoyed this immensely. Kuhn’s Take on Nicolaus Copernicus’ Revolution One of the courses Kuhn offered students was The Copernican Revolution, which he used as the basis for his first book, published in 1957. He scrutinized Nicolaus Copernicus’s famous book De revolutionibus with its bold claim that the earth orbits the sun. Kuhn came to the conclusion that De revolutionibus was: “a revolution-making rather than a revolutionary text.” He claimed, with some justification, that Copernicus’s model was no more accurate and no simpler in its portrayal of heavenly bodies than the previous system devised by Claudius Ptolemy 1,400 years earlier. Kuhn believed Copernicus’s model was ultimately preferred because it was more pleasing to its audience – in other words for aesthetic reasons rather than scientific reasons. Certainly the fact that in Copernicus’s model there was no need for Ptolemy’s equant was aesthetically appealing. (The equant was an extremely clever mathematical improvisation Ptolemy devised to make his theory of planetary movements work.) Scholars such as Richard Hall have pointed out that Copernicus’s model actually does have some scientific advantages over Ptolemy’s, such as those concerning the maximum elongation of Venus and Mercury, the explanation of retrograde motion, and the frequency of retrogressions. Written for a general rather than a narrow specialist readership, Kuhn’s book has proven to be a keeper. The copy in front of me is from the twenty-fourth printing in 2003. Berkeley & the Center for Advanced Study In 1956, Harvard had still not offered Kuhn tenure. He accepted an offer from the University of California at Berkeley, where he became an assistant professor in both the Philosophy and History Departments. In 1958, he was promoted to associate professor and given tenure. In the fall of that year, he began a one-year fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study. It was here he wrote a significant part of his most influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1961, he was promoted to full professor of the History of Science at Berkeley. This actually infuriated him, because he wanted to be a professor of Philosophy. In the end, however, he agreed to accept the position in History. The Paradigm Shift The concept of the paradigm shift made Kuhn’s name. The term became widely used in all disciplines, not just science. Kuhn first described the paradigm shift in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The concept had been in his mind for many years, starting when he asked himself how an intelligent man like Aristotle could have harbored absurd ideas about motion. It dawned on him that the framework of science in which Aristotle interpreted facts was entirely different from the framework of science (or to be more specific, the framework of basic mechanics) we use today, courtesy of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. The change of framework was the paradigm shift. Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus provided Kuhn with another example of a paradigm shift. Before De revolutionibus, all facts were interpreted within a framework that said our planet lies at the center of the universe. Within a few decades, all facts were being interpreted within a new framework, which said the earth is actually a planet orbiting the sun. Normal Science After a paradigm shift has taken place, Kuhn said, scientists can begin building up facts again, perhaps studying different problems and searching for facts in different places suggested by the new paradigm. He described this period between paradigm shifts as normal science or puzzle solving. Incommensurability Kuhn also discussed the concept of incommensurability. The word itself is not a common one. Ancient Greeks described a triangle whose hypotenuse’s length is an irrational number as incommensurable. While a whole number such as 1 and a fraction such as 1/3 are on a common scale (you need three of one to exactly equal the other) there is no common scale between a whole number and an irrational number like √2. Kuhn used the word incommensurable to describe paradigms that represent wholly different world views of the same subject – for example, the mechanics of Aristotle vs Newton, which differ so drastically that there is little common ground between them. Princeton and MIT In 1964, Kuhn moved to Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979, he became Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Impact of Kuhn’s Work on Science Most scientists are only vaguely aware of Kuhn’s work, although like most people are familiar with the idea of a paradigm shift. Humanities students are generally more familiar Kuhn’s work. Some Personal Details and the End By ancestry Kuhn was Jewish. By choice he was an agnostic. While studying for his PhD, Kuhn became rather isolated from other people, repeating the experience of his final high school years. Working in an almost all-male setting, he worried his mother by not dating women. He agreed to undergo psychoanalysis. Looking back on the experience, he said he hated the psychiatrist, who would fall asleep during sessions. The psychoanalysis ended because the psychiatrist left town and Kuhn got married. He married Kathryn Muhs in 1948. His wife, like his mother, was a graduate of Vassar College. She typed his PhD thesis. They had two daughters and a son – Sarah, Elizabeth, and Nathaniel. The couple divorced in 1978. In 1981, age 59, Kuhn married Jehane Barton Burns. He retired from MIT in 1991, age 69. Thomas Kuhn died, age 73, of cancer on June 17, 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had been suffering from throat and lung cancer for two years. Advertisements Author of this page: The Doc © All rights reserved. Cite this Page Please use the following MLA compliant citation: "Thomas Kuhn." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 12 Jun. 2017. Web. <www.famousscientists.org/thomas-kuhn/>. Published by FamousScientists.org Further Reading Thomas S. Kuhn The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought Harvard University Press, 1957 Richard J. Hall Kuhn and the Copernican Revolution British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 21 No. 2: pp. 196-197, 1970
7992	dbpedia	3	40	https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo3629340.html	en	Thomas Kuhn	https://tmm.chicagodistr…780226268965.jpg	https://tmm.chicagodistr…780226268965.jpg	[ "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/logo.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/icons/icon-cart.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.imaging/mte/ucp/medium/dam/ucp/books/jacket/0226/26/0226268942/jcr:content/0226268942.jpeg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/icons/press-save.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/icons/press-request-copy.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/icons/press-library.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/icons/press-rights-permissions.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/icons/press-back-to-top.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/icons/press-back-to-top.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.imaging/mte/ucp/thumbnail/dam/ucp/books/jacket/978/02/26/51/9780226514512.jpg/jcr:content/9780226514512.jpg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.imaging/mte/ucp/thumbnail/dam/ucp/books/jacket/978/02/26/61/9780226618654.jpg/jcr:content/9780226618654.jpg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.imaging/mte/ucp/thumbnail/dam/ucp/books/jacket/978/02/26/24/9780226241364.jpg/jcr:content/9780226241364.jpg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.imaging/mte/ucp/thumbnail/dam/ucp/books/jacket/978/02/26/31/9780226317205.jpg/jcr:content/9780226317205.jpg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/logo-inverted.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2000-06-18T00:00:00	The book Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, Steve Fuller is published by University of Chicago Press.	en	/favicon.ico	University of Chicago Press	https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo3629340.html	Be the first to know Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!
7992	dbpedia	0	49	https://www.nndb.com/people/284/000044152/	en	Thomas Kuhn			[ "https://www.nndb.com/title.gif", "https://www.nndb.com/red-profile-2.gif", "https://www.nndb.com/people/284/000044152/kuhn.jpg", "https://www.nndb.com/man.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null			/silly-nndb-icon.png		null	AKA Thomas Samuel Kuhn Born: 18-Jul-1922 Birthplace: Cincinnati, OH Died: 17-Jun-1996 Location of death: Cambridge, MA Cause of death: Cancer - unspecified Gender: Male Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Author, Philosopher Nationality: United States Executive summary: Structure of Scientific Revolutions Although never directly stated, was most likely an atheist. Wife: Jehane Kuhn (two daughters, one son) Daughter: Sarah Kuhn Daughter: Elizabeth Kuhn Son: Nathaniel Kuhn University: BS Physics, Harvard University University: PhD Physics, Harvard University (1949) Professor: Harvard University Professor: University of California at Berkeley (1956-64) Professor: Philosophy and History of Science, Princeton University (1964-79) Professor: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979-) The Harvard Crimson Guggenheim Fellowship 1954 George Sarton Medal 1982 Draft Deferment: World War II Author of books: The Copernican Revolution (1957) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977) Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (1987) The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993 (2000, essays) New! NNDB MAPPER Create a map starting with Thomas Kuhn Requires Flash 7+ and Javascript. Do you know something we don't? Submit a correction or make a comment about this profile
7992	dbpedia	1	6	https://archive.philosophersmag.com/thomas-kuhn-a-snapshot/	en	Thomas Kuhn: a snapshot	https://archive.philosophersmag.com/wp-content/themes/genesis-sample/images/favicon.ico	https://archive.philosophersmag.com/wp-content/themes/genesis-sample/images/favicon.ico	[ "https://archive.philosophersmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/TPM_logo.png", "https://www.philosophersmag.com/images/Issu-78-cover.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Kerrie Grain" ]	1998-01-01T00:00:02+00:00	Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He received a Ph. D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949 and remained there as an assistant professor of general education and history of science. In 1956, Kuhn accepted a post at the University of California–Berkeley, where in 1961 he […]	en	https://archive.philosophersmag.com/wp-content/themes/genesis-sample/images/favicon.ico	The Philosophers' Magazine Archive	https://archive.philosophersmag.com/thomas-kuhn-a-snapshot/	Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He received a Ph. D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949 and remained there as an assistant professor of general education and history of science. In 1956, Kuhn accepted a post at the University of California–Berkeley, where in 1961 he became a full professor of history of science. In 1964, he was named M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. In 1979 he returned to Boston, this time to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as professor of philosophy and history of science. In 1983 he was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Of the five books and countless articles he published, Kuhn’s most renown work is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which he wrote while a graduate student in theoretical physics at Harvard. Initially published as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, it was published in book form by the University of Chicago Press in 1962. It has sold some one million copies in 16 languages and is required reading in courses dealing with education, history, psychology, research, and, of course, history and philosophy of science. Throughout thirteen succinct but thought-provoking chapters, Kuhn argued that science is not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead, science is “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions,” which he described as “the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.” After such revolutions, “one conceptual world view is replaced by another.” Although critics chided him for his imprecise use of the term, Kuhn was responsible for popularising the term paradigm, which he described as essentially a collection of beliefs shared by scientists, a set of agreements about how problems are to be understood. According to Kuhn, paradigms are essential to scientific inquiry, for “no natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism.” Indeed, a paradigm guides the research efforts of scientific communities, and it is this criterion that most clearly identifies a field as a science. A fundamental theme of Kuhn’s argument is that the typical developmental pattern of a mature science is the successive transition from one paradigm to another through a process of revolution. When a paradigm shift takes place, “a scientist’s world is qualitatively transformed [and] quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory.” Kuhn also maintained that, contrary to popular conception, typical scientists are not objective and independent thinkers. Rather, they are conservative individuals who accept what they have been taught and apply their knowledge to solving the problems that their theories dictate. Most are, in essence, puzzle-solvers who aim to discover what they already know in advance – “The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly.” During periods of normal science, the primary task of scientists is to bring the accepted theory and fact into closer agreement. As a consequence, scientists tend to ignore research findings that might threaten the existing paradigm and trigger the development of a new and competing paradigm. For example, Ptolemy popularised the notion that the sun revolves around the earth, and this view was defended for centuries even in the face of conflicting evidence. In the pursuit of science, Kuhn observed, “novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.” And yet, young scientists who are not so deeply indoctrinated into accepted theories – a Newton, Lavoisier, or Einstein – can manage to sweep an old paradigm away. Such scientific revolutions come only after long periods of tradition-bound normal science, for “frameworks must be lived with and explored before they can be broken.” However, crisis is always implicit in research because every problem that normal science sees as a puzzle can be seen, from another perspective, as a counterinstance and thus as a source of crisis. This is the “essential tension” in scientific research. Crises are triggered when scientists acknowledge the discovered counterinstance as an anomaly in fit between the existing theory and nature. All crises are resolved in one of three ways. Normal science can prove capable of handing the crisis-provoking problem, in which case all returns to “normal.” Alternatively, the problem resists and is labelled, but it is perceived as resulting from the field’s failure to possess the necessary tools with which to solve it, and so scientists set it aside for a future generation with more developed tools. In a few cases, a new candidate for paradigm emerges, and a battle over its acceptance ensues – these are the paradigm wars. Kuhn argued that a scientific revolution is a noncumulative developmental episode in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one. But the new paradigm cannot build on the preceding one. Rather, it can only supplant it, for “the normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but actually incommensurable with that which has gone before.” Revolutions close with total victory for one of the two opposing camps. Kuhn also took issue with Karl Popper’s view of theory-testing through falsification. According to Kuhn, it is the incompleteness and imperfection of the existing data-theory fit that define the puzzles that characterise normal science. If, as Popper suggested, failure to fit were grounds for theory rejection, all theories would be rejected at all times. In the face of these arguments, how and why does science progress, and what is the nature of its progress? Kuhn argued that normal science progresses because members of a mature scientific community work from a single paradigm or from a closely related set and because different scientific communities seldom investigate the same problems. The result of successful creative work addressing the problems posed by the paradigm is progress. In fact, it is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assured. Moreover, “the man who argues that philosophy has made no progress emphasises that there are still Aristotelians, not that Aristotelianism has failed to progress.” As to whether progress consists in science discovering ultimate truths, Kuhn observed that “we may have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.” Instead, the developmental process of science is one of evolution from primitive beginnings through successive stages that are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. Kuhn argued that this is not a process of evolution toward anything, and he questioned whether it really helps to imagine that there is one, full, objective, true account of nature. He likened his conception of the evolution of scientific ideas to Darwin’s conception of the evolution of organisms. The Kuhnian argument that a scientific community is defined by its allegiance to a single paradigm has especially resonated throughout the multiparadigmatic (or preparadigmatic) social sciences, whose community members are often accused of paradigmatic physics envy. Kuhn suggested that questions about whether a discipline is or is not a science can be answered only when members of a scholarly community who doubt their status achieve consensus about their past and present accomplishments. Thomas Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954 and was awarded the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science in 1982. He held honorary degrees from institutions that included Columbia University and the universities of Notre Dame, Chicago, Padua, and Athens. He suffered from cancer during the last years of his life. Thomas Kuhn died on Monday, June 17, 1996, at the age of 73 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was survived by his wife and three children.
7992	dbpedia	2	11	https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/historians-us-biographies/thomas-samuel-kuhn	en	Thomas Samuel Kuhn			[ "https://www.encyclopedia.com/themes/custom/trustme/images/header-logo.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "Get information", "facts", "and pictures", "about Thomas Samuel Kuhn", "at Encyclopedia.com", "Make", "research", "projects", "and school reports", "about Thomas Samuel Kuhn", "easy", "with credible", "articles", "from our FREE", "online encyclopedia and dictionary" ]	null	[]	null	KUHN, THOMAS SAMUEL(b. Cincinnati, Ohio, 18 July 1922; d.	en	/sites/default/files/favicon.ico		https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/historians-us-biographies/thomas-samuel-kuhn	KUHN, THOMAS SAMUEL (b. Cincinnati, Ohio, 18 July 1922; d. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 17 June 1996), philosophy of science, history of science, concept of paradigm. A physicist turned historian of science for philosophical purposes, Kuhn was one of the most influential philosophers of science in the twentieth century. In his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962, Kuhn helped destroy the popular image of science according to which science steadily and incrementally progresses toward a true and complete picture of reality. Relying on historical case studies, Kuhn argued that, ruptured by scientific revolutions, scientific development was discontinuous and noncumulative and that scientific activity before and after a revolution was in some ways incommensurable, lacking a common measure. In this way Kuhn not only formed a startling picture of science, but also initiated a new way of doing philosophy of science informed by the history of science. Life and Career . Thomas Kuhn was the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, who was trained as a hydraulic engineer at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Annette Stroock Kuhn. Both parents were nonpracticing Jews. Kuhn attended several schools in New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Among them, Hessian Hills in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, a progressive school that encouraged independent thinking, made a particularly strong impression on him. He then attended Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in physics in 1943. Despite the fact that his interest lay in theoretical physics, most of his coursework was in electronics, due to the orientation of his department. His professors included George Birkhoff, Percy W. Bridgman, Leon Chaffee, and Ronald W. P. King. He also took several elective courses in social sciences and humanities, including a philosophy course in which Immanuel Kant struck him as a revelation. He did not enjoy the history of science course that he attended, which was taught by the famous historian of science George Sarton. After graduation, he worked on radar for the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard and later for the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development in Europe. He returned to Harvard at the end of the war, obtained his master’s degree in physics in 1946, and worked toward a PhD degree in the same department. He also took a few philosophy courses in order to explore other possibilities than physics. It was about this time that the legendary president of Harvard University, the chemist and founder of “Harvard Case Studies in Experimental Science” James Conant, asked Kuhn to assist his course on science, designed for undergraduates in humanities as part of the General Education in Science Curriculum. This event changed Kuhn’s life. His encounter with classical texts, especially Aristotle’s Physics, was a crucial experience for him. He realized that it was a great mistake to read and judge an ancient scientific text from the perspective of current science and that one could not really understand it unless one got inside the mind of its author and saw the world through his eyes, through the conceptual framework he employed to describe phenomena. This understanding shaped his later historical and philosophical studies. In 1948 Kuhn became a junior member of the Harvard Society of Fellows upon Conant’s recommendation. A year later, he completed his PhD in physics under the supervision of John H. van Vleck, who won the Nobel Prize in 1977. Kuhn became an assistant professor of general education and the history of science in 1952 and taught at Harvard until 1956. During this period he trained himself as a historian of science, and Alexandre Koyré’s works, especially his Galilean Studies, had a deep impact on him. Between 1948 and 1956, Kuhn published three articles, one with van Vleck on computing cohesive energies of metals, derived from his PhD dissertation, and a number of historical works on Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Sadi Carnot’s cycle. He also wrote his first book, The Copernican Revolution, which was published in 1957. Nevertheless, Kuhn was denied tenure because the review committee thought that the book was too popular and not sufficiently scholarly. Feeling disappointed, Kuhn accepted a joint position as an assistant professor in the history and philosophy departments at the University of California, Berkeley. Soon after, he published his masterpiece, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It was also here that he met Paul Feyerabend, who introduced a version of the thesis of incommensurability at the same time Kuhn did. But the interaction was not fruitful. The person who influenced him most at Berkeley was Stanley Cavell. Cavell introduced him to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose view of meaning as use and idea of family resemblance had a lasting influence on Kuhn. He also heard Michael Polányi’s lectures on tacit knowledge, a notion that also found its way into his influential book. Between 1961 and 1964 he headed a project known as the “Sources for History of Quantum Physics,” which contained interviews with, and manuscript materials of, all the major scientists who contributed to the development of quantum physics. These materials are now part of the Archive for History of Quantum Physics. Kuhn was offered a full professorship at Berkeley in history, not in philosophy. Although disappointed, he accepted the offer. Not long after, however, he left Berkeley for the position of M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. He taught at Princeton from 1964 to 1979 and then, because of his divorce, he left Princeton and joined the philosophy department at MIT. In 1982 he was appointed to the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professorship in Philosophy, a position he held until 1991 when he retired. He became professor emeritus at MIT from then on until his death. He was survived by his second wife Jehane, his ex-wife Kathryn Muhs, and their three children. Thomas Kuhn received the Howard T. Behrman Award for distinguished achievements in the humanities (1977), the History of Science Society’s George Sarton Medal (1982), and the Society for Social Studies of Science’s John Desmond Bernal Award (1983). He was a Guggenheim Fellow during 1954 to 1955, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1972–1979), a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He also held honorary degrees from Columbia, Chicago, and Notre Dame universities in the United States, the University of Padua in Italy, and the University of Athens in Greece. He was the only person to have served as presidents of both the History of Science Society (1968–1970) and the Philosophy of Science Association (1988–1990). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Structure for short) opens with the sentence, “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed” (1970, p. 1). According to that image, science progresses toward truth in a linear fashion, each new theory incorporating the old one as a special case. Scientific progress is due to the scientific method, whereby theories are tested against observations and experiments; those that fail are disconfirmed or get eliminated and those that pass the tests are considered to be confirmed, or at least not yet falsified. This image was very popular among scientists, and in the philosophical world it was represented in various forms by logical positivists such as Rudolf Carnap, who emphasized confirmability and by Karl Popper, who emphasized falsifiability. Most logical positivists, though emphatically not Popper, also believed that observation provided neutral and secure grounds for the appraisal of scientific theories. It was generally agreed that scientific rationality and objectivity was a matter of compliance with the rules of scientific method, leaving little room for individual choices. Although Structure contained only one explicit reference to Popper and none to the logical positivists, clearly it targeted them, and together with the works of Norwood Hanson, Paul Feyerabend, and Stephen Toulmin, it destroyed the existing conception of science and scientific change. The main thesis of Kuhn’s book was that development in mature sciences typically goes through two consecutive phases: normal and revolutionary. Normal science is a paradigm-governed activity of puzzle solving. Based on settled consensus of the scientific community, normal scientific activity has little room for novelty that transcends the bounds of the paradigm. A paradigm provides a concrete model (called an “exemplar”) for solving problems it has set out. Kuhn called these problems “puzzles” because the paradigm assures the members of the scientific community that with sufficient skill and ingenuity they can be solved within its resources. Thus, in case of failure to solve a puzzle it is the individual scientist, not the paradigm, that is to be blamed. When, however, puzzles resist persistent attempts at solution, they turn into anomalies; and anomalies lead to a crisis when they accumulate. Crisis is marked by a loss of confidence in the paradigm and a search for an alternative one. Rival accounts proliferate, the most fundamental commitments about nature get questioned, and in the end, the scientific community embraces the most promising alternative as the new paradigm. A scientific revolution has occurred. Consequently, a new period of normal science begins, and a similar cycle of normal science–crisis–revolution follows. Whereas normal science is cumulative, revolutionary science is not. The new paradigm and the activity governed by it are in many ways incompatible with the old one. Kuhn expressed this point in terms of the thesis of incommensurability, which has several aspects. Both problems and the way they are solved change: there is a conceptual change, whereby certain terms acquire new meanings; because every observation is theory-laden, there is a perceptual change, a Gestalt switch, which causes the scientists to see the world differently; and, finally, there is even a sense in which the world itself changes after a revolution. For instance, according to Kuhn, the Aristotelian world contains swinging stones, but no pendulums. Accordingly, whereas the Aristotelian scientist sees constrained motion in a swinging stone, the Galilean-Newtonian scientist (who may as well be a transformed Aristotelian) literally sees a pendulum. In short, the new paradigm is incommensurable with the old one. Scientists working under rival paradigms often talk past each other and experience a breakdown in communication. The switch from one paradigm to another is very much like a conversion experience rather than a rational choice dictated mechanically by scientific methodology. Furthermore, much that has been accepted as true is discarded, making it impossible to say that the new paradigm brings us closer to truth. Not surprisingly, Structure sent shock waves through the philosophical community. Kuhn was accused of robbing science of its rationality and objectivity, turning it into a kind of mob psychology; he was charged with relativism, subjectivism, and outright idealism. Normal science was said to be dangerously dogmatic. The notion of “paradigm” was held to be too vague, lacking a definite meaning. In the “Postscript” to Structure, which was added to the second edition in 1970, and in several subsequent articles, most notably “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice,” collected in The Essential Tension, published in 1977, Kuhn defended himself against these charges, clarifying some of his earlier statements and retracting others. In this context the first thing he did was to clarify what he meant by “paradigm,” for which he now preferred the term “disciplinary matrix.” A disciplinary matrix consisted of four elements: metaphysical commitments; methodological commitments; criteria such as quantitative accuracy, broad scope, simplicity, consistency, and fruitfulness (which Kuhn called “values” since they are desired characteristics of scientific theories); and exemplars. The most important of these is exemplars, that is, concrete problem solutions that serve as models. Exemplars are always given in use; they guide research even in the absence of rules; and the study of exemplars enables scientists to acquire an ability to see family resemblances among seemingly unrelated problems. Much knowledge that is acquired in this way is tacit, inexpressible in propositions. Normal science is dogmatic to some degree, since it does not allow the questioning of the paradigm itself, but this sort of dogmatism is functional: it allows the scientists to further articulate their paradigmatic theory and pay undivided attention to the existing puzzles and anomalies, the recognition of which is a precondition for the emergence of novel theories and subsequently a revolution. In this way Kuhn dispelled the charges of vagueness and dogmatism. He also took pains to argue that incommensurability, the target of the greatest outrage, did not necessarily imply incomparability. Two paradigms, he said, often share enough common points to make it possible to compare them. For example, the astronomical data regarding the position of Mercury, Mars, and Venus were shared by both the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic and Copernican paradigms, and they both appealed to similar criteria (“values”). These commonalities provided sufficient grounds for paradigm comparison. Kuhn pointed out, however, that two scientists working under rival paradigms may share the same criteria but apply them differently to concrete cases. When they are confronted with a new puzzle, they may disagree, for instance, about whether paradigm A or B provides a simpler solution, or they may attach different weights to the shared criteria. This is a perfectly rational disagreement, and the only way to resolve it is through the techniques of persuasion. It is for this reason that paradigm choice often involves subjective, though not arbitrary, decisions. Rather than denying rationality, Kuhn developed a new conception of it. For him rationality is not just a matter of compliance with methodological rules. This is because the knowledge of how to apply a paradigm to a new puzzle is mostly learned not by being taught abstract rules but by being exposed to concrete exemplars. Yet this is a kind of tacit knowledge that is almost impossible to detach from the cases from which it was acquired. Thus, both paradigm choice and paradigm application often involve judgment and deliberation, a process akin to Aristotle’s phronesis; each scientist must use her lifelong experience, her “practical wisdom,” to make the best possible decision. In short, Kuhn urged a shift from a conception of rationality based on the mechanical application of determinate rules to a model of rationality that emphasizes the role of exemplars, deliberation, and judgment. Kuhn also argued that science does progress, but not toward truth in the sense of correspondence to an objective reality, because later theories are incommensurable with the earlier ones. Scientific progress for Kuhn simply meant increasing puzzle-solving ability: later theories are better than earlier ones in discovering and solving more and more puzzles. Appealing to the existence of shared criteria for paradigm comparison and to an instrumental idea of scientific progress, Kuhn tried to defend himself against the charge of relativism. The Linguistic Turn . In the 1980s and 1990s Kuhn wrote a number of articles, reformulating most of his philosophical views in terms of language, more specifically in terms of what he called taxonomic lexicons. These articles were published posthumously in the collection The Road since Structure (2000) and can be summarized as follows. First of all, having abandoned the terms disciplinary matrix as well as the much-used and -abused term paradigm in favor of theory, Kuhn now underlined the point that every scientific theory has its own distinctive structured taxonomic lexicon: a taxonomically ordered network of kind-terms, some of which are antecedently available relative to the theory in question. Second, lexicons are prerequisite to the formulation of scientific problems and their solutions, and descriptions of nature and its regularities. Hence, revolutions can be characterized as significant changes in the lexicons of scientific theories: both the criteria relevant to categorization and the way in which given objects and situations are distributed among preexisting categories are altered. Since different lexicons permit different descriptions and generalizations, revolutionary scientific development is necessarily discontinuous. Third, the distinction between normal and revolutionary science now becomes the distinction between activities that require changes in the scientific lexicon and those that do not. Revolutions involve, among other things, novel discoveries that cannot be described within the existing lexical network, so scientists feel forced to adopt a new one. The earlier mentalistic description (i.e., Gestalt switches and conversions) disappears from Kuhn’s writings. Finally, incommensurability is reduced to a sort of untranslatability, localized to one or another area in which two lexical structures differ. What gives rise to incommensurability is the difference between lexical structures. Because rival lexical structures differ radically, there are sentences of one theory that cannot be translated into the lexicon of the other theory without loss of meaning. All other aspects of incommensurability that were present in Structure drop out. Kuhn also gave a Kantian twist to these ideas. He argued that structured lexicons are constitutive of phenomenal worlds and possible experiences of them. In Kuhn’s view a taxonomic lexicon functions very much like the Kantian categories of the mind. This in turn led him not only to embrace a distinction between noumena and phenomena, but also to claim that fundamental laws, such as Newton’s second law, are synthetic a priori. The sense of a priori Kuhn had in mind is not “true for all times,” but something like “constitutive of objects of experience.” This is a historical or relativized a priori, like Hans Reichenbach’s. Taxonomic lexicons do vary historically, unlike Kantian categories. Even the second law is revisable despite the fact that it is recalcitrant to refutation by isolated experiments. Accordingly, Kuhn’s final position can be characterized as an evolutionary linguistic Kantianism. Using first principles, as it were, regarding the structure of taxonomic lexicons of scientific theories, and having a developmental perspective not simply derivative from the historical case studies, Kuhn’s linguistic turn enabled him to refine, add to, and unify his earlier views about scientific revolutions, incommensurability, and exemplars. He was also able to explain more clearly why incommensurability does not imply incomparability and why communication breakdown across a revolution is always partial. This is because incommensurability is a local, not global, phenomenon pertaining to a small subset of the scientific lexicon, and whatever communication breakdown exists can be overcome by becoming bilingual. Furthermore, he was finally able to articulate the sense in which the scientist’s world itself changes after a revolution. That sense is Kantian. Whereas the noumenal world is fixed, the phenomenal world constituted by a lexicon is not. Different lexicons “carve up,” as it were, different phenomenal worlds from the unique noumenal world, so Kuhn could now respond to the charge of idealism by pointing out that the noumenal world does exist independently of human minds, though it remains unknowable. History of Science . In the background of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is The Copernican Revolution, Kuhn’s first major contribution to the historiography of science. That book grew out of Kuhn’s science course for the humanities at Harvard in the 1950s and provided one of the key historical case studies that later enabled him to articulate his views about the development of science. The Copernican Revolution achieved several things at once. It showed above all that Nicolaus Copernicus was both a revolutionary and a conservative at the same time. Contrary to popular belief, the Copernican heliocentric system, with its rotating spheres, perfectly circular orbits, epicycles, and eccentricities, was in many ways a continuation of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic tradition of astronomy. But this conservativeness also meant that the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic tradition was a respectable scientific enterprise, having its own conceptual framework, problems, and ways of solving them. When looked at retrospectively, however, the Copernican system did pave the way, albeit unintentionally, for a revolution in science through the works of Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Newton. Kuhn argued forcefully in his book that aesthetic considerations played an important role in Copernicus’s placing the Sun at the center and thus turning Earth into an ordinary planet; the Ptolemaic system looked increasingly complicated, indeed “monstrous,” in the eyes of Copernicus. Although his model did not automatically yield simpler calculations, it provided qualitatively more coherent interpretations of certain phenomena, notably, the retrograde motion of planets. In addition to these, Kuhn drew attention to social factors behind the Copernican Revolution as well, such as the need for calendar reform, improved maps, and navigational techniques. Kuhn also pointed out the larger ramifications of the heliocentric system—in particular, how it changed the conception human beings had of their unique place in the universe and what sense that conception had for them. After The Copernican Revolution, Kuhn wrote a number of influential historical articles, including one on energy conservation as an example of simultaneous discovery, one on the difference between mathematical and experimental (dubbed as “Baconian”) traditions in the development of physical sciences, and another, with John Heilbron, on the genesis of the Bohr atom. Most of these are conveniently collected in his book The Essential Tension. Kuhn’s final major contribution to the historiography of science was his controversial book Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912, published in 1978. It constituted a break with a longstanding historio-graphical tradition and undermined the consensus between physicists and historians that quantum physics originated in the works of Max Planck in 1900. According to the traditional interpretation, Planck was forced to introduce the idea of energy quanta, thus breaking with classical physics. More sophisticated versions of this interpretation, which recognized that Planck himself did not understand the exact meaning of the energy quanta, were also defended in various forms by historians of science. In his book Kuhn argued that Planck did not abandon the framework of classical physics until after Hendrik Lorentz, Paul Ehrenfest, and Albert Einstein in 1905 attempted to understand his theory of blackbody radiation. Of the two historical books Kuhn wrote, the earlier one became a small classic of its own. Historians criticized the second one for exaggerating its case and ignoring certain developmental aspects of Planck’s works, and philosophers were surprised that it did not contain any references to “paradigms,” “normal science,” “incommensurability,” and the like. Kuhn defended himself in the second edition, arguing that many of the themes of Structure were there, though implicitly. Kuhn wore two hats, but never simultaneously. He saw the history and the philosophy of science as interrelated but separate disciplines with different aims. He believed that no one could practice them at the same time. As a philosopher, he said, he was interested in generalizations and analytical distinctions, but as a historian he was trying to construct a narrative that was coherent, comprehensible, and plausible. For this latter task, the historian had to pay attention first to the factors internal to science, such as ideas, concepts, problems, and theories, and to external factors like social, economic, political, and religious realities. In his historical works Kuhn focused primarily (but not exclusively) on the internal factors, but believed that although the internal and the external approaches were autonomous, they were complementary. He saw the unification of them as one of the greatest challenges facing the historian of science. Impact . Kuhn’s immense impact on the philosophy of science was exclusively through his works, since he did not supervise any PhD theses in this field. He did have, however, a number of PhD students in the history of science, including John Heilbron, Norton Wise, and Paul Forman, though Forman, in the end, completed his PhD thesis officially under Hunter Dupree. In historiography of science, Kuhn was a first-rate practitioner of the approach inaugurated by Alexandre Koyré, whom he admired deeply. Following Koyré, Kuhn believed that understanding a historical text necessarily involves a hermeneutical activity by which the historian interprets the text in its own terms and intellectual context. This means that the history of science should always be seen as part of the history of ideas, wherein the aim is to produce a maximally coherent interpretation. The historian is not someone who merely chronicles who discovered what and when. The projection of current conceptions onto past events is a cardinal sin often committed by the earlier positivistically inclined generations of historians of science, including Sarton. In the hands of Koyré, Kuhn, Rupert Hall, Bernard Cohen, Richard Westfall, and others, a new way of practicing historiography of science emerged. As a result, the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became the topic that played a decisive role in historiographical developments. Kuhn’s influence was incomparably greater in the field of philosophy. Structure was translated into some twenty languages and sold over a million copies. It is still indispensable reading not only in philosophy of science, but also in philosophy generally. More than any other text, it was responsible for the overthrow of logical positivism both as a source of a certain image of science and as a philosophical practice. After Structure, the field of philosophy of science took a historical turn in the 1970s and 1980s, using historical case studies either to ground or to test “empirically” a given view of the development of science. Kuhn’s views also led to the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge founded by Barry Barnes and David Bloor, who argued that the very content and nature of scientific knowledge can be explained sociologically and a fortiori naturalistically. Kuhn, however, distanced himself from the Strong Programme, characterizing it as a “deconstruction that has gone mad.” With its emphasis on the scientific community and its practices, Kuhn’s philosophy eventually gave rise to what is called social studies of science, a subspecialty that attempts to unify philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and ethnographic approaches into a coherent whole. The feminist critique of science, too, that has emerged since the 1980s owes much to Kuhn’s insights. Indeed, all of these studies are now routinely referred to as “post-Kuhnian.” Kuhn’s views had virtually no impact on the practice of science itself, but they did catch the attention of both physicists and social scientists. While the former group was largely critical, the latter group was mostly sympathetic. The interest of social scientists was to a great extent methodological: they wondered whether sociology, political science, and economics were “mature sciences” like physics and chemistry, governed by a single paradigm at a given period, and whether they conformed to the pattern of normal science–crisis–revolution–normal science. One noticeable effect of such studies was that physical sciences came to be seen as being as interpretive as social sciences were, and in that respect not so different from them. Were Kuhn’s ideas as revolutionary as they were widely taken to be? Recent historical studies on the origins and development of logical positivism indicate that there are as many similarities and continuities as there are differences and discontinuities between that movement and Kuhn’s views. Kuhn himself confessed later in life that he had fortunately very limited firsthand knowledge of logical positivist writings; otherwise, he said, he would have written a completely different book. But, as Alexander Bird put it, like Copernicus and Planck, Kuhn inaugurated a revolution that went far beyond what he himself imagined. BIBLIOGRAPHY WORKS BY KUHN “Robert Boyle and Structural Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century.” Isis 43 (1952): 12–36. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research.” In Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Technical Invention, from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Alistair C. Crombie. London: Heinemann, 1963. With John L. Heilbron, Paul Forman, and Lini Allen. Sources for History of Quantum Physics: An Inventory and Report. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 68. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1967. With John L. Heilbron. “The Genesis of the Bohr Atom.” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 1 (1969): 211–290. “Alexandre Koyré and the History of Science: On an Intellectual Revolution.” Encounter 34 (1970): 67–69. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd enlarged ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. First published in 1962. The second edition contains the 1969 “Postscript.” “Notes on Lakatos.” In PSA 1970: In Memory of Rudolf Carnap; Proceedings of the 1970 Biennial Meeting, Philosophy of Science Association, edited by Roger C. Buck and Robert S. Cohen. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 8. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1971. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. 2nd ed. with a new “Afterword.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. “History of Science.” In Current Research in Philosophy of Science, edited by Peter D. Asquith and Henry E. Kyburg. East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, 1979. “The Halt and the Blind: Philosophy and History of Science.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 31 (1980): 181–192. The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview. Edited by James Conant and John Haugeland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. OTHER SOURCES Barnes, Barry. T. S. Kuhn and Social Science. London: Macmillan, 1982. Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. A critical overview. Darrigol, Olivier. “The Historians’ Disagreement over the Meaning of Planck’s Quantum.” Centaurus 43 (2001): 219–239. Friedman, Michael. “On the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and Its Philosophical Agenda.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 29 (1998): 239–271. Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Galison, Peter. “Kuhn and the Quantum Controversy.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 32 (1981): 71–85. Gutting, Gary, ed. Paradigms and Revolutions. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980. Written by eminent philosophers, social scientists, and historians of science, these essays assess Kuhn’s pre-1980 writings and their impact in various fields. Horwich, Paul, ed. World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. An in-depth discussion of Kuhn’s latest views; also contains Kuhn’s long reply “Afterwords,” which is his final statement. Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Meticulous exposition, with a foreword by Kuhn. Irzik, Gürol, and Teo Grünberg. “Carnap and Kuhn: Arch Enemies or Close Allies?” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (1995): 285–307. Kindi, Vasso. “The Relation of History of Science to Philosophy of Science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Kuhn’s Later Philosophical Work.” Perspectives on Science 13 (2006): 495–530. Koyré, Alexandre. Études galiléennes. Paris: Hermann, 1939. Also 1966 and 1997. Translation by John Mepham as Galilean Studies. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978. Lakatos, Imre, and Alan Musgrave, eds. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. London: Cambridge University Press, 1970. An early classic volume displaying the then-current state of debate among Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend, and others. Newton-Smith, W. H. The Rationality of Science. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. A good overview of philosophy of science. Nickles, Thomas, ed. Thomas Kuhn. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Sankey, Howard. Rationality, Relativism and Incommensurability. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1997. Sharrock, Wes, and Rupert Read. Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2002. Westman, Robert S. “Two Cultures or One?: A Second Look at Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution.” Isis 85 (1994): 79–115. Gürol Irzik Kuhn, Thomas Samuel (b. 18 July 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio; d. 17 June 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts), physicist turned historian and philosopher who transformed the study of the history and philosophy of science in the 1960s. Kuhn was one of two children of Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn, a civic activist and professional editor; both were nonobservant Jews. When Kuhn was an infant, the family moved to New York City. The home atmosphere was politically liberal, and his parents sent him to “progressive” schools that encouraged pupils to think for themselves. In the mid-1930s—as the Great Depression gripped America, fascism threatened Europe, and Stalin tightened his control of the Soviet Union—Kuhn attended the progressive Hessian Hills School in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. There, he later recalled, “there were various radical left teachers all over.” Young Kuhn participated in May Day marches and was an articulate pacifist, but as World War II approached, he changed his mind and supported U.S. intervention. In 1940 he entered Harvard University, where he majored in physics, served as an editor of the Harvard Crimson, and graduated summa cum laude in 1943 (a year early because of wartime mobilization). During the war he worked on radar countermeasures at a U.S. laboratory in England and visited radar facilities on the Continent. He witnessed the liberation of Paris. Afterward, he returned to Harvard and pursued a doctorate in physics, although by this time he was more interested in philosophy, especially that of Kant. The turning point in Kuhn’s life came when he was befriended by Harvard president James B. Conant, who sought Kuhn’s aid in developing a program to teach science to nonscience majors. The course would emphasize “case histories” of scientific research through the centuries. On a hot summer day in 1947, while doing research for the Conant course and reading Aristotle’s Physics, Kuhn experienced an epiphany. To a modern scientist, Aristotle appears hopelessly antiquated, but Kuhn suddenly understood how the philosopher’s physical notions made sense within the intellectual context of ancient Greece. Kuhn compared this new understanding (a type of “empathetic historiography,” that is, the effort to understand past cultures in their own terms rather than critiquing them by modern standards) to the gestalt switch cited by gestalt psychologists. A familiar example of a gestalt switch is a drawing of what appears to be ducks. Gaze at the sketch long enough, and suddenly they look like rabbits: What changes is not the raw data (the drawing) but rather one’s perception of it. According to traditional historical accounts, science had advanced over the centuries by steadily accumulating raw data, in the manner advocated by the Elizabethan scholar-politician Francis Bacon. By contrast, Kuhn realized that fundamental scientific revolutions may occur via reinterpretations of the same old data. His appreciation of the importance of such shifts in consciousness was strengthened when he read the works of Alexandre Koyré, who argued that Galileo’s achievements owed more to the seventeenth-century astronomer’s theoretical insights than to his celebrated physics experiments. On 27 November 1948 Kuhn married Kathryn Muhs; they had three children. Kuhn received his M.S. degree in 1946 and his Ph.D. in 1949, both from Harvard. In 1951 he lectured on the nature of scientific change at the Boston Public Library. From 1952 to 1956 he was an assistant professor of general education and the history of science at Harvard. In 1956 Kuhn accepted a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley. His first book, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957), lucidly explained how in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries astronomers abandoned the ancient astronomer Ptolemy’s Earth-centered cosmology for the Sun-centered theory of Nicolaus Copernicus. Although Copernicus relied on the same observational data as Ptolemy, the former astronomer perceived a totally different arrangement of celestial bodies—another example of a gestalt switch. Kuhn’s most famous work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), depicted the history of science as alternating periods of placid “puzzle-solving” and revolutionary changes of perspective, akin to gestalt switches that he dubbed “paradigm shifts.” A mature scientific field operates with basic assumptions (in other word, paradigms, such as Ptolemaic or Copernican astronomy) that steer research in specific directions. No paradigm is all-explanatory: it always faces a number of “anomalies”—scientific observations or experimental results that challenge its underlying assumptions. (For example, pre-Copernican astronomers struggled for centuries to understand why planets moved in “anomalous” directions inconsistent with predictions of the Ptolemaic cosmology.) During a period of “normal science,” researchers try to explain anomalies in a manner consistent with the paradigm—a process that Kuhn called “puzzle solving.” Over time, the accumulation of anomalies can become unbearable. Scientists struggle to “explain away” the anomalies in increasingly ad hoc ways. Rather than continue sticking with the old paradigm, a few scientists suggest radical alternatives. Most of these alternatives will fail, but one or more might offer real advantages, such as greater conciseness or predictive power. Eventually this new paradigm may displace the old one. Does science progress? In that regard, Kuhn’s most disturbing claim was that scientific paradigms are at least partly “incommensurable”: one paradigm cannot necessarily be treated as a special case subsumed by its successor. For example, the terminology of Newtonian physics cannot readily be translated into the terminology of its successor, Einsteinian physics. This is because terms such as “mass” and “force” have different meanings within each paradigm. (Kuhn’s thinking here was indirectly inspired by the linguistic and anthropological ruminations of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Benjamin Lee Whorf.) True, progress occurs within a paradigm; scientists can accumulate more and more information that is compatible with the paradigm. But when science shifts from one paradigm to another, it is harder to say whether “progress” has occurred, for one paradigm’s terms may be incommensurable with the other’s. Hence, Kuhn suggested, comparing two paradigms is like comparing apples and aardvarks, and a scholar might reasonably question whether one paradigm is “truer” than its predecessor. Although tentative and vague, Kuhn’s comments on incommensurability stirred excitement and controversy, for they appeared (on the surface, anyway) to question a cherished tenet of modernism: that science invariably progresses over the centuries. Indeed, Kuhn suggested (again, somewhat vaguely) that in certain time periods, science may move backward—in other words, lose “knowledge” by pursuing paradigms that prove to be blind alleys. Kuhn’s book became a best-seller by academic standards. About 750,000 copies were sold during his lifetime. His views especially intrigued social scientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, who debated how (and whether) they should try to develop organizing paradigms for their conflict-bloodied fields. Kuhn’s ideas also attracted attention from social critics of science, who gained attention in the 1960s and 1970s partly because of growing public concern about the high-tech Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, and environmental destruction. Kuhn also attracted critics. The philosopher Imre Lakatos accused Kuhn of attributing scientific change to “mob psychology.” Another philosopher, Karl Popper, said Kuhn’s view of “normal science” sanctioned a semiauthoritarian ethic of scientific research. According to Popper, Kuhnianism implied that scientists should blindly obey paradigmatic rules in hopes that these would lead, ironically, to revolutionary insights. To the contrary, Popper declared: scientists should openly challenge authority by proposing “outrageous” hypotheses to test and perhaps “falsify” orthodox ideas. Upset, Kuhn insisted that both his admirers and critics had misinterpreted him. According to academic folklore, his postscript to the 1970 edition of Structure backed away from some of his earlier claims. However, a careful reading of the postscript suggests that he abandoned no crucial position. Kuhn’s status as the field’s radical visionary was challenged by the rise of more overtly radical, colorful figures, such as the “episteme” theorist Michel Foucault and “anarchic epistemologist” Paul K. Feyerabend. Compared to them and the more recent postmodern scholars, Kuhn looked conservative, even orthodox. A distinctly Kuhnian school never emerged. One reason is that some historians of science rejected Kuhn’s model as being too vague or as irrelevant to most historical episodes of scientific change. Another reason is that Kuhn trained few doctoral students. Although he could become passionate and animated during intellectual discussion, he was a shy, chain-smoking loner who liked to cultivate his ideas at his own pace. By his own admission (in a 1995 interview), he tended to drive students away by insisting on rigorous intellectual standards. Kuhn left Berkeley in 1964 for Princeton, where he was the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science until 1979. While at Princeton, he served as physics adviser on the editorial board of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. In the latter part of his Princeton years, he published The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977) and the highly controversial Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912 (1978), which questioned the standard account of Max Planck’s discovery of the quantum nature of matter and energy. In September 1978 Kuhn divorced Kathryn; the next year he became the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On 26 October 1982 he married Jehane Burns. In his last years he tried to complete a final book clarifying his views and answering his critics. The book was unfinished when he died from cancer of the bronchial tubes. Thanks partly to Kuhn, the study of the history of science—once regarded as an academic backwater—became a respectable intellectual field in the late twentieth century. His views have been quoted (and misquoted) by thinkers across the intellectual spectrum, as Hegel’s were in his heyday. Less happily for Kuhn, his ideas were co-opted by popular culture: the term “paradigm shift” has become a cliche from Main Street to Madison Avenue. In popular parlance, it refers to any radical shift of opinion or worldview. Certain aspects of Kuhn’s thinking were anticipated by other scholars, among them Ludwik Fleck in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (original German edition, 1935); R. G. Collingwood in Essay on Metaphysics (1940); W. V. O. Quine in Word and Object (1960); and Stephen Toulmin in Foresight and Understanding (1961). Kuhn frankly discussed his life and work in an interview published as “A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn,” which appears in the Greek scholarly journal Neusis 6 (spring summer 1997): 145–200. Important biographical material, including the possible role of psychoanalytic thought in influencing Kuhn’s philosophical outlook, is in Jensine Andresen, “Crisis and Kuhn,” Isis 90 (1999): S43-S67. The numerous detailed analyses of Kuhn’s work include David A. Hollinger, “T. S. Kuhn’s Theory of Science and Its Implications for History,” American Historical Review (1973): 370, and Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science (1993), both of which Kuhn regarded highly. Attacks on Kuhn appear in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970); Steven Weinberg, “The Revolution That Didn’t Happen,” New York Review of Books (8 Oct. 1998); and Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (2000). A forceful reply to Fuller is David A. Hollinger, “Paradigms Lost,” New York Times Book Review (28 May 2000). A profile of Kuhn in his last years is in John Horgan, The End of Science (1996). Obituaries are in the New York, Times (19 June 1996) and Washington Post (20 June 1996). See also an insightful obituary by one of Kuhn’s early students, John L. Heilbron, “Thomas Samuel Kuhn,” Isis 89 (1998): 505–515. Keay Davidson Thomas Samuel Kuhn Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science. He found that basic ideas about how nature should be studied were dogmatically accepted in normal science, increasingly questioned, and overthrown during scientific revolutions. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1922, Thomas Kuhn was trained as a physicist but became an educator after receiving his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1949. He taught as an assistant professor of the history of science at Harvard from 1952 to 1957, as a professor of the history of science at Berkeley (California) from 1958 to 1964, as a professor of the history of science at Princeton from 1964 to 1979, as a professor of philosophy and the history of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1979 to 1983, and finally, Laurence Rockefeller professor of philosophy at MIT from 1983 to 1991. A member of many professional organizations, he was president of the History of Science Society from 1968 to 1970. He received the Howard T. Behrman award at Princeton in 1977 and the George Sarton medal from the History of Science Society in 1982. Kuhn's scholarly achievements were many. He held positions as a Lowell lecturer in 1951, Guggenheim fellow from 1954 to 1955, fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science from 1958 to 1959, director of the Sources for the History of Quantum Physics Project from 1961 to 1964, director of the Social Science Research Council from 1964 to 1967, director of the program for history and philosophy of science at Princeton from 1967 to 1972, member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1972 to 1979, and member of the Assembly for Behavioral and Social Science in 1980. Kuhn was best known for debunking the common belief that science develops by the accumulation of individual discoveries. In the summer of 1947 something happened that shattered the image of science he had received as a physicist. He was asked to interrupt his doctorate physics project to lecture on the origins of Newton's physics. Predecessors of Newton such as Galileo and Descartes were raised within the Aristotelian scientific tradition. Kuhn was shocked to find in Aristotle's physics precious little a Newtonian could agree with or even make sense of. He asked himself how Aristotle, so brilliant on other topics, could be so confused about motion and why his views on motion were taken so seriously by later generations. One hot summer day while reading Aristotle, Kuhn said he he had a brainstorm. "I gazed abstractly out the window of my room. Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together, my jaw dropped," as reported by his friend and admirer, Malcolm Gladwell, in the July 8th issue of The New Yorker. He realized that he had been misreading Aristotle by assuming a Newtonian point of view. Taught that science progresses cumulatively, he had sought to find what Aristotle contributed to Newton's mechanics. This effort was wrong-headed, because the two men had basically different ways of approaching the study of motion. For example, Aristotle's interest in change in general led him to regard motion as a change of state, whereas Newton's interest in elementary particles, thought to be in continuous motion, led him to regard motion as a state. That continuous motion requires explanation by appeal to some force keeping it in motion was taken as obvious by Aristotle. But Newton thought that continued motion at a certain speed needed no explanation in terms of forces. Newton invoked the gravitational force to explain acceleration and advanced a law that an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an external force. This discovery turned Kuhn's interest from physics to the history of physics and eventually to the bearing of the history of science on philosophy of science. His working hypothesis that reading a historical text requires sensitivity to changes in meaning provided new insight into the work of such great physicists as Boyle, Lavoisier, Dalton, Boltzmann, and Plank. This hypothesis was a generalization of his finding that Aristotle and Newton worked on different research projects with different starting points which eventuated in different meanings for basic terms such as "motion" or "force." Most people probably think that science has exhibited a steady accumulation of knowledge. But Kuhn's study of the history of physics showed this belief to be false for the simple reason that different research traditions have different basic views that are in conflict. Scientists of historically successive traditions differ about what phenomena ought to be included in their studies, about the nature of the phenomena about what aspects of the phenomena do or do not need explanation, and even about what counts as a good explanation or a plausible hypothesis or a rigorous test of theory. Especially striking to Kuhn was the fact that scientists rarely argued explicitly about these basic research decisions. Scientific theories were popularly viewed as based entirely on inferences from observational evidence. But no amount of experimental testing can dictate these decisions because they are logically prior to testing by their nature. What, if not observations, explains the consensus of a community of scientists within the same tradition at a given time? Kuhn boldly conjectured that they must share common commitments, not based on observation or logic alone, in which these matters are implicitly settled. Most scientific practice is a complex mopping-up operation, based on group commitments, which extends the implications of the most recent theoretical breakthrough. Here, at last, was the concept for which Kuhn had been searching: the concept of normal science taking for granted a paradigm, the locus of shared commitments. In 1962 Kuhn published his landmark book on scientific revolutions, which was eventually translated into 16 languages and sold over a million copies. He coined the term "paradigm" to refer to accepted achievements such as Newton's Principia which contain examples of good scientific practice. These examples include law, theory, application, and instrumentation. They function as models for further work. The result is a coherent research tradition. In his postscript to the second edition, Kuhn pointed out the two senses of "paradigm" used in his book. In the narrow sense, it is one or more achievement wherein scientists find examples of the kind of work they wish to emulate, called "exemplars." In the broad sense it is the shared body of preconceptions controlling the expectations of scientists, called a "disciplinary matrix." Persistent use of exemplars as models gives rise to a disciplinary matrix that determines the problems selected for study and the sorts of answers acceptable to the scientific community. Using the paradigm concept, Kuhn developed a theory of scientific change. A tradition is pre-scientific if it has no paradigm. A scientific tradition typically passes through a sequence of normal science-crisis-revolution-new normal science. Normal science is puzzle-solving governed by a paradigm accepted uncritically. Difficulties are brushed aside and blamed on the failure of the scientist to extend the paradigm properly. A crisis begins when scientists view these difficulties as stemming from their paradigm, not themselves. If the crisis is not resolved, a revolution sets in, but the old paradigm is not given up until it can be replaced by a new one. Then new normal science begins and the cycle is repeated. Just when to accept a new paradigm and when to stick to the old one is a matter not subject to proof, although good reasons can be adduced for both options. Scientific rationality is not found in rules of scientific method but in the collective judgment of the scientific community. We must give up the notion that science progresses cumulatively toward the truth about reality; after a revolution it merely replaces one way of seeing the world with another. Kuhn's theory of scientific change was the most widely influential philosophy of science since that of his mentor, Sir Karl Popper. Kuhn's claims were much discussed by scientists, who generally accepted them; by sociologists, who took them to elucidate the subculture of scientists; by historians, who found cases of scientific change not fitting his model; and by philosophers, who generally abhorred Kuhn's historical relativism about knowledge but accepted the need for their theories of science to do justice to its history. Kuhn was often perturbed by those who sought to— in his view—apply his ideas to areas where it was inappropriate. "I'm much fonder of my critics than my fans," he often said, according to Gladwell's New Yorker article. Indeed, he even tried in later years to replace the term "paradigm"—which he felt was being overused—with "exemplar." Kuhn died June 17, 1996, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Notwithstanding the tendency of some to misapply his theories, history will show that Kuhn indeed transformed the image of science by making it exciting and emphasizing that it is a social process in addition to being a rational one. Further Reading Kuhn's four books are The Copernican Revolution (1957), The Essential Tension (1959), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, second edition 1970), and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894-1912 (1978). Clear discussions of his views in order of increasing sophistication are found in George Kneller's Science as a Human Endeavor (1978), Garry Gutting's Paradigms and Revolutions (1980), Harold Brown's Perception, Theory and Commitment (1977), and Ian Hacking's Scientific Revolutions (1981). "My Jaw Dropped," by Malcolm Gladwell in the July 8th issue of The New Yorker is a tribute by an admirer. His obituary, by Lawrence Van Gelder, is in the June 29th edition of The New York Times. □
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dominants.	en	https://cdn.astrotheme.c…e-touch-icon.png		https://www.astrotheme.com/astrology/Thomas_Kuhn	Horoscope and chart of Thomas Kuhn Astrological portrait of Thomas Kuhn (excerpt) Disclaimer: these short excerpts of astrological charts are computer processed. They are, by no means, of a personal nature. This principle is valid for the 68,676 celebrities included in our database. These texts provide the meanings of planets, or combination of planets, in signs and in houses, as well as the interpretations of planetary dominants in line with modern Western astrology rules. Moreover, since Astrotheme is not a polemic website, no negative aspect which may damage the good reputation of a celebrity is posted here, unlike in the comprehensive astrological portrait. Introduction Here are some character traits from Thomas Kuhn's birth chart. This description is far from being comprehensive but it can shed light on his/her personality, which is still interesting for professional astrologers or astrology lovers. In a matter of minutes, you can get at your email address your astrological portrait (approximately 32 pages), a much more comprehensive report than this portrait of Thomas Kuhn. N.B.: as this celebrity's birth time is unknown, the chart is arbitrarily calculated for 12:00 PM - the legal time for his/her place of birth; since astrological houses are not taken into account, this astrological profile excerpt is less detailed than those for which the birth time is known. The dominant planets of Thomas Kuhn When interpreting a natal chart, the best method is to start gradually from general features to specific ones. Thus, there is usually a plan to be followed, from the overall analysis of the chart and its structure, to the description of its different character traits. In the first part, an overall analysis of the chart enables us to figure out the personality's main features and to emphasize several points that are confirmed or not in the detailed analysis: in any case, those general traits are taken into account. Human personality is an infinitely intricate entity and describing it is a complex task. Claiming to rapidly summarize it is illusory, although it does not mean that it is an impossible challenge. It is essential to read a natal chart several times in order to absorb all its different meanings and to grasp all this complexity. But the exercise is worthwhile. In brief, a natal chart is composed of ten planets: two luminaries, the Sun and the Moon, three fast-moving or individual planets, Mercury, Venus and Mars, two slow-moving planets, Jupiter and Saturn, and three very slow-moving planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Additional secondary elements are: the Lunar Nodes, the Dark Moon or Lilith, Chiron and other minor objects. They are all posited on the Zodiac wheel consisting of twelve signs, from Aries to Pisces, and divided into twelve astrological houses. The first step is to evaluate the importance of each planet. This is what we call identifying the dominant planets. This process obeys rules that depend on the astrologer's sensitivity and experience but it also has precise and steady bases: thus, we can take into account the parameters of a planet's activity (the number of active aspects a planet forms, the importance of each aspect according to its nature and its exactness), angularity parameters; (proximity to the four angles, Ascendant, Midheaven, Descendant and Imum Coeli or Nadir, all of them being evaluated numerically, according to the kind of angle and the planet-angle distance) and quality parameters (rulership, exaltation, exile and fall). Finally, other criteria such as the rulership of the Ascendant and the Midheaven etc. are important. These different criteria allow a planet to be highlighted and lead to useful conclusions when interpreting the chart. The overall chart analysis begins with the observation of three sorts of planetary distributions in the chart: Eastern or Western hemisphere, Northern or Southern hemisphere, and quadrants (North-eastern, North-western, South-eastern and South-western). These three distributions give a general tone in terms of introversion and extraversion, willpower, sociability, and behavioural predispositions. Then, there are three additional distributions: elements (called triplicity since there are three groups of signs for each one) - Fire, Air, Earth and Water - corresponding to a character typology, modality (or quadruplicity with four groups of signs for each one) - Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable - and polarity (Yin and Yang). There are three types of dominants: dominant planets, dominant signs and dominant houses. The novice thinks astrology means only "to be Aries" or sometimes, for example, "to be Aries Ascendant Virgo". It is actually far more complex. Although the Sun and the Ascendant alone may reveal a large part of the character - approximately a third or a half of your psychological signature, a person is neither "just the Sun" (called the sign) nor just "the first house" (the Ascendant). Thus, a particular planet's influence may be significantly increased; a particular sign or house may contain a group of planets that will bring nuances and sometimes weaken the role of the Ascendant, of the Sun sign etc. Lastly, there are two other criteria: accentuations (angular, succedent and cadent) which are a classification of astrological houses and types of decanates that are occupied (each sign is divided into three decanates of ten degrees each). They provide some additional informations. These general character traits must not be taken literally; they are, somehow, preparing for the chart reading. They allow to understand the second part of the analysis, which is more detailed and precise. It focuses on every area of the personality and provides a synthesis of all the above-mentioned parameters according to sound hierarchical rules. Warning: when the birth time is unknown, which is the case for Thomas Kuhn, a few paragraphs become irrelevant; distributions in hemispheres and quadrants are meaningless, so are dominant houses and houses' accentuations. Therefore, some chapters are removed from this part. For all paragraphs, the criteria for valuation are calculated without taking into account angles and rulerships of the Ascendant and of the Midheaven. The methodology retains its validity, but it is less precise without a time of birth. Elements and Modes for Thomas Kuhn The predominance of Water signs indicates high sensitivity and elevation through feelings, Thomas Kuhn. Your heart and your emotions are your driving forces, and you can't do anything on Earth if you don't feel a strong affective charge (as a matter of fact, the word "feeling" is essential in your psychology). You need to love in order to understand, and to feel in order to take action, which causes a certain vulnerability which you should fight against. Like the majority of Earth signs, Thomas Kuhn, you are efficient, concrete and not too emotional. What matters to you is what you see: you judge the tree by its fruits. Your ideas keep changing, words disappear, but actions and their consequences are visible and remain. Express your sensitivity, even if it means revealing your vulnerability. Emotions, energy and communication must not be neglected; concrete action is meaningless if it is not justified by your heart, your intellect or your enthusiasm. The twelve zodiacal signs are split up into three groups or modes, called quadruplicities, a learned word meaning only that these three groups include four signs. The Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable modes are more or less represented in your natal chart, depending on planets' positions and importance, and on angles in the twelve signs. Thomas Kuhn, the Cardinal mode is dominant here and indicates a predisposition to action, and more exactly, to impulsion and to undertake: you are very keen to implement the plans you have in mind, to get things going and to create them. This is the most important aspect that inspires enthusiasm and adrenalin in you, without which you can grow weary rapidly. You are individualistic (maybe too much?) and assertive. You let others strengthen and improve the constructions which you built with fervour. Dominants: Planets, Signs and Houses for Thomas Kuhn The issue of dominant planets has existed since the mists of time in astrology: how nice it would be if a person could be described with a few words and one or several planets that would represent their character, without having to analyse such elements as rulerships, angularities, houses, etc! The ten planets - the Sun throughout Pluto - are a bit like ten characters in a role-play, each one has its own personality, its own way of acting, its own strengths and weaknesses. They actually represent a classification into ten distinct personalities, and astrologers have always tried to associate one or several dominant planets to a natal chart as well as dominant signs and houses. Indeed, it is quite the same situation with signs and houses. If planets symbolize characters, signs represent hues - the mental, emotional and physical structures of an individual. The sign in which a planet is posited is like a character whose features are modified according to the place where he lives. In a chart, there are usually one, two or three highlighted signs that allow to rapidly describe its owner. Regarding astrological houses, the principle is even simpler: the twelve houses correspond to twelve fields of life, and planets tenanting any given house increase that house's importance and highlight all relevant life departments: it may be marriage, work, friendship etc. In your natal chart, Thomas Kuhn, the ten main planets are distributed as follows: The three most important planets in your chart are the Moon, Pluto and Uranus. The Moon is one of the most important planets in your chart and endows you with a receptive, emotive, and imaginative nature. You have an innate ability to instinctively absorb atmospheres and impressions that nurture you, and as a result, you are often dreaming your life away rather than actually living it. One of the consequences of your spontaneity may turn into popularity, or even fame: the crowd is a living and complex entity, and it always appreciates truth and sincerity rather than calculation and total self-control. As a Lunar character, you find it difficult to control yourself, you have to deal with your moods, and you must be careful not to stay passive in front of events: nothing is handed on a plate, and although your sensitivity is rich, even richer than most people's, you must make a move and spare some of your energy for... action! With Pluto as a dominant planet in your chart, you are a magnetic and mighty predator, like the Scorpio sign ruled by this planet, who needs to exert pressure on others in order to "test" them. You are always ready to evolve, to risk destruction for reconstruction - including your own - to live more intensely whilst imposing your secret authority on things and on people you encounter. You may come across as wicked, cruel or too authoritarian, but actually you only follow your instinct, you sound people out, and you like to exert your domination simply because your vital energy is too powerful to remain inside. You are inclined to be passionate, with hidden motivations. You are sometimes misunderstood but one of your great Plutonian assets is to go successfully through each life ordeal with ever growing strength. Uranus is among your dominant planets: just like Neptune and Pluto, Uranian typology is less clearly defined than the so-called classical seven planets that are visible to the naked eye, from the Sun to Saturn. However, it is possible to associate your Uranian nature with a few clear characteristics: Uranus rhymes with independence, freedom, originality, or even rebelliousness and marginality, when things go wrong... Uranus is Mercury's higher octave and as such, he borrows some of its traits of character; namely, a tendency to intellectualize situations and emotions with affective detachment, or at least jagged affectivity. Therefore, you are certainly a passionate man who is on the lookout for any kind of action or revolutionary idea, and you are keen on new things. Uranians are never predictable, and it is especially when they are believed to be stable and well settled that... they change everything - their life, partner, and job! In fact, you are allergic to any kind of routine, although avoiding it must give way to many risks. In your natal chart, the three most important signs - according to criteria mentioned above - are in decreasing order of strength Cancer, Taurus and Libra. In general, these signs are important because your Ascendant or your Sun is located there. But this is not always the case: there may be a cluster of planets, or a planet may be near an angle other than the Midheaven or Ascendant. It may also be because two or three planets are considered to be very active because they form numerous aspects from these signs. Thus, you display some of the three signs' characteristics, a bit like a superposition of features on the rest of your chart, and it is all the more so if the sign is emphasized. Cancer is one of your dominant signs and endows you with imagination and exceptionally shrewd sensitivity. Although suspicious at first sight - and even at second...- as soon as you get familiar with people and let them win your confidence, your golden heart eventually shows up, despite your discretion and your desire for security that make you return into your shell at the slightest alert! Actually, you are a poet and if you are sometimes blamed for your nostalgia and your laziness, it is because your intense inner life is at full throttle... With the Taurus sign so important in your chart, you are constructive, stable, and sensual. Good taste, sense of beauty, manners, and unfailing good sense - all these qualities contribute to your charm and seductive power. Furthermore, if some people criticize your slow pace and your stubbornness, you rightly reply that this is the price for your security, and that you like the way it is - slow and steady.... With Libra as a dominant sign in your natal chart, you love to please, to charm, and to be likeable. Moreover, you are naturally inclined towards tolerance and moderation, as well as elegance and tact, as if you were meant to please! Of course, you always find malcontents who criticize your lack of authenticity or of courage and your half-heartedness, but your aim is to be liked, and in this field, you are an unrivalled champion! After this paragraph about dominant planets, of Thomas Kuhn, here are the character traits that you must read more carefully than the previous texts since they are very specific: the texts about dominant planets only give background information about the personality and remain quite general: they emphasize or, on the contrary, mitigate different particularities or facets of a personality. A human being is a complex whole and only bodies of texts can attempt to successfully figure out all the finer points. The Moon in Taurus: his sensitivity You love nature as much as your comfort, Thomas Kuhn, you are an Epicurean willing to enjoy life's beautiful and good things within the family clan or with friends who value your conviviality and your kindness. You are faithful, stable, with your feet rooted in the ground and you are reliable in all circumstances. You are attached to your affective and material security. You tend to be jealous and possessive and, although your nature is quite slow, you may be short-tempered and aggressive when you feel threatened. In such cases, you display an exceptional stubbornness and fury and it becomes impossible to make you change your mind. Although you are aware that your behaviour is wrong, you stick to your line and your grudge is persistent. However, you are so sensitive to tenderness and to concrete gestures of affection that a few presents or a few caresses are enough to make you see life through rose-coloured glasses again... Mercury in Cancer: his intellect and social life Your intelligence is sensitive and delicate, with good comprehension abilities, Thomas Kuhn, which endows you with a strong intuition and receptivity. To you, impressions and feelings prevail over facts and your excellent selective memory is not cluttered with useless elements. Although you are not aware, your fertile imagination may lead you to change your daily reality so that it matches your dreams better. If you are creative, you may make use of your imagination in literary pursuits where you can freely invent beautiful stories taking place in the past. Your passion for History is such that you may immerse yourself into it with too much nostalgia and therefore, you may miss opportunities the present offers to design projects and to think of the future. Venus in Virgo and the Sun in Cancer: his affectivity and seductiveness In your chart, the Sun is in Cancer and Venus, in Virgo. Modesty and moderation: they are the dominant characteristics of the Cancer-Virgo duet, according to the Tradition. You are not the most extroverted person in the world and it is hard for you to declare your love or to express your passion. It might be due to a form of shyness, a desire to protect yourself and to prevent people from upsetting your fragile affective balance. Regardless of the intensity of your love, your partner must not expect staggering declarations, but an unfailing faithfulness, a real dedication motivated by the desire to build a privileged, isolated and treasured relationship. It is likely that tenderness is the key to your affective fulfilment. Without tenderness, there can be no deep-seated balance. In the long run, you cannot be satisfied with budding flashes of passion and with a relationship solely based on heart tumults. The real adventure begins when the wild excitements of the early stages fade away, when you have nothing to prove to yourself and when mutual confidence allows for a life together, despite the inevitable differences between you and your partner. You probably belong to that category of lover for whom time is an asset rather than an enemy. An ally needed for the full blossoming of your relationship. Thomas Kuhn, inside yourself, feelings are strong and powerful. However, you never show them before weighing up and considering all the possible consequences of your words and your actions: fieriness and spontaneousness are toned down because you cannot help controlling yourself, probably due to your modesty, your discretion or your shyness; you are frightened because you are so concerned with other people's opinion that you see passion, or expressing your feelings too quickly, as sources of danger. However, you are helpful, simple, and you do not fuss around. Reason prevails in your love life but your heart may flare up when the context is well organized and everyday life is cautiously handled with good sense, tidiness and cleanliness. Your sensitivity prompts you to avoid excesses and outbursts and this is how you think that you can achieve happiness without risk. The Sun in Cancer: his will and inner motivations Psychologically speaking, your nature is dreamy, oriented towards nostalgia for things past. You are very instinctive and you protect yourself against the outside world. Your inner life is rich, with fertile and even unlimited imagination, a propensity to avoid unnecessary risks and to pursue security. You show your true face only to persons you can trust, when there is a kind of well being triggered by the nostalgia for the past. As you are born under this sign, you are emotional, sentimental, restful, imaginative, sensitive, loyal, enduring, protective, vulnerable, generous, romantic, tender, poetic, maternal, dreamy, indolent, greedy and dedicated. You may also be fearful, unrealistic, evasive, passive, touchy, anxious, dependent, stubborn, lunatic, backward-looking, lazy, burdensome, impenetrable and a homebody. Love in the masculine mode: for you, Sir, in love, you are tender, sensitive and quite loyal. You are influenced by a mother-figure and you unconsciously look for a partner who will offer as much attention and affection as you used to receive as a child. You are a homebody and a dreamer and you blossom in the family cocoon you create, dreaming of adventures and extraordinary trips that you most often take in your head. Tenderness is more important than sexuality, even though it is also an agent for security and for stability. You tremendously appreciate to be again the spoiled child that you used to be, as you savour tasty little dishes or as you receive the frequent praises you need in order to feel reassured. You are sheltered from tragedies and life complications because at the very moment when a difficult situation emerges, you nip it in the bud either by ignoring it or by withdrawing into your shell quietly, until the storm subsides. Your home is happy and rich, quiet and harmonious, throughout your life. Mars in Sagittarius: his ability to take action Thomas Kuhn, you are a real Goliath and you often excel in sport; your thirst for conquests prompts you to constantly launch new challenges. The enthusiasm you put in your undertakings is perfectly well supported by your moral concepts and an idealism compatible with the values of the society you live in. You are pragmatic, enterprising and sometimes, naive. You do not pay attention to details and you launch various great adventurous projects that are all doomed to success. In a few rare cases, you can funnel your huge energy into more philosophical, even spiritual or religious enterprises, where your entire fieriness works wonders. On the sexual plane, your ardour and your spontaneity are your main assets. The danger is that you may spread yourself too thin in the sense that you may forget about faithfulness, particularly during the extensive faraway travels you are so fond of. Conclusion This text is only an excerpt from of Thomas Kuhn's portrait. If you want to get your own astrological portrait, much more comprehensive that this present excerpt, you can order it at this page. Do you belong to the Jupiterian type, benevolent and generous? The Martian type, active and a go-getter? The Venusian type, charming and seductive? The Lunar type, imaginative and sensitive? The Solar type, noble and charismatic? The Uranian type, original, uncompromising and a freedom-lover? The Plutonian type, domineering and secretive? The Mercurian type, cerebral, inquiring and quick? The Neptunian type, visionary, capable of empathy and impressionable? The Saturnian type, profound, persevering and responsible? Are you more of the Fire type, energetic and intuitive? The Water type, sentimental and receptive? The Earth type, realistic and efficient? Or the Air type, gifted in communication and highly intellectual? 11 planetary dominants and 57 characteristics are reviewed, quantified, and interpreted; then, your psychological portrait is described in detail, in a comprehensive document of approximately 32-36 pages, full of engrossing and original pieces of information about yourself. Astrological reports describe many of the character traits and they sometimes go deeper into the understanding of a personality. Please, always keep in mind that human beings are continuously evolving and that many parts of our psychological structures are likely to be expressed later, after having undergone significant life's experiences. It is advised to read a portrait with hindsight in order to appreciate its astrological content. Under this condition, you will be able to take full advantage of this type of study. The analysis of an astrological portrait consists in understanding four types of elements which interact with one another: ten planets, twelve zodiacal signs, twelve houses, and what are called aspects between planets (the 11 aspects most commonly used are: conjunction, opposition, square, trine, sextile, quincunx, semi-sextile, sesqui-quadrate, quintile and bi-quintile. The first 5 aspects enumerated are called major aspects). Planets represent typologies of our human psychology: sensitivity, affectivity, ability to undertake, will-power, mental process, aptitude, and taste for communication etc., all independent character facets are divided here for practical reasons. The twelve signs forming the space where planets move will "colour", so to speak, these typologies with each planet being located in its particular sign. They will then enrich the quality of these typologies, as expressed by the planets. The Zodiac is also divided into twelve astrological houses. This makes sense only if the birth time is known because within a few minutes, the twelve houses (including the 1st one, the Ascendant) change significantly. They correspond to twelve specific spheres of life: external behaviour, material, social and family life, relationship, home, love life, daily work, partnership, etc. Each planet located in any given house will then act according to the meaning of its house, and a second colouration again enriches those active forces that the planets symbolize. Finally, relations will settle among planets, creating a third structure, which completes the planets' basic meanings. A set of ancient rules, which has stood the test of experience over hundreds of years (although astrology is in evolution, only reliable elements are integrated into classical studies), are applied to organize the whole chart into a hierarchy and to allow your personality to be interpreted by texts. The planets usually analysed are the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, which means two luminaries (the Sun and the Moon) and 8 planets, a total of 10 planets. Additional secondary elements may be taken into account, such as asteroids Chiron, Vesta, Pallas, Ceres (especially Chiron, more well-known), the Lunar nodes, the Dark Moon or Lilith, and even other bodies: astrology is a discipline on the move. Astrological studies, including astrological portrait, compatibility of couples, predictive work, and horoscopes evolve and become more accurate or deeper, as time goes by. Precision: concerning the horoscopes with a known time of birth, according to the Tradition, we consider that a planet near the beginning (called cuspide) of the next house (less than 2 degrees for the Ascendant and the Midheaven, and less than 1 degree for all other houses) belongs to this house: our texts and dominants take this rule into account. You can also choose not to take this shift into account in the form, and also tick the option Koch or Equal houses system instead of Placidus, the default houses system. Warning: In order to avoid any confusion and any possible controversy, we want to draw your attention upon the fact that this sample of celebrities is very complete and therefore, it also includes undesirable people, since every category is represented: beside artists, musicians, politicians, lawyers, professional soldiers, poets, writers, singers, explorers, scientists, academics, religious figures, saints, philosophers, sages, astrologers, mediums, sportsmen, chess champions, famous victims, historical characters, members of royal families, models, painters, sculptors, and comics authors or other actual celebrities, there are also famous murderers, tyrants and dictators, serial-killers, or other characters whose image is very negative, often rightly so. Regarding the latter, it must be remembered that even a monster or at least a person who perpetrated odious crimes, has some human qualities, often noticed by his/her close entourage: these excerpts come from computer programmes devoid of polemical intentions and may seem too soft or lenient. The positive side of each personality is deliberately stressed. Negative sides have been erased here - it is not the same in our comprehensive reports on sale - because it could hurt the families of such people. We are hoping that it will not rebound on the victims' side. Numerology: Birth Path of Thomas Kuhn Testimonies to numerology are found in the most ancient civilizations and show that numerology pre-dates astrology. This discipline considers the name, the surname, and the date of birth, and ascribes a meaning to alphabetic letters according to the numbers which symbolise them. The path of life, based on the date of birth, provides indications on the kind of destiny which one is meant to experience. It is one of the elements that must reckoned with, along with the expression number, the active number, the intimacy number, the achievement number, the hereditary number, the dominant numbers or the lacking numbers, or also the area of expression, etc. Your Life Path is influenced by the number 3, which highlights communication and creativity, and indicates that ideas and personal realisations are the important features of your destiny. This number is related to altruism, harmony, the capacity to take initiatives, and the gift for passing on all kinds of knowledge and information. So, you are a person of communication, and your concern is to disseminate your ideas and your beliefs, as well as to discover other approaches and schools of thoughts. In a word, you are open to the world! You express yourself better when you are in situations which allow a great deal of personal initiatives. Then, your inventiveness works wonders. On the other hand, you find it hard to fulfil repetitive tasks and to accept the monotony of a life devoid of surprise. Your creativity is as strong as your need for freedom, and people often envy you because, even though you may encounter a few hurdles, your ingenuity enables you to merrily grow on your path. Thomas Kuhn was born under the sign of the Dog, element Water Chinese astrology is brought to us as a legacy of age-old wisdom and invites us to develop an awareness of our inner potential. It is believed that the wise man is not subjected to stellar influences. However, we must gain the lucidity and the distance without which we remain locked up in an implacable destiny. According to the legend of the Circle of Animals, Buddha summoned all the animals to bid them farewell before he left our world. Only twelve species answered Buddha's call. They form the Chinese Zodiac and symbolize the twelve paths of wisdom that are still valid nowadays. The Asian wise man considers that a path is neither good nor bad. One can and must develop one's potentialities. The first step is to thoroughly know oneself. You belong to the category of reliable people, true to their principles as well as loyal to their friends. You try to organize your life settings. If you are not concerned with the disorder that is external to your private sphere, everything related to your personality and your environment must be in order. Therefore, you are a perfectionist by nature, but you are also anxious and meticulous to an exaggerate point: you enjoy discussing details, analyzing and criticizing everything. Your concern is to keep your realm under control, which implies a fair amount of modesty and some distance. The Dog is aware of his limits and he prefers to stick to what he masters rather than being tempted by some exceedingly adventurous conquest. But the capacity to control your realm constitutes an obvious asset, an extraordinary driving force favouring your evolution. As one contents oneself with doing well in the field which one thoroughly masters, one can go far, very far... Methodically - sometimes with your own method - you allow the dust to settle, you purify, using a process of elimination, until the essentials only remain. You may be lacking ambition. It does not matter! You leave panache and veneer to other people and you take up challenges in your unique way, with discretion, moderation, modesty or reserve. Chinese astrology has five elements, which are referred to as agents: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. You have a deep affinity with the agent Water. In China, this element corresponds to the planet Mercury, the black colour and the number 6. You are particularly sensitive to your surroundings, the atmosphere of a place and the climate of a meeting. Your high receptivity allows you to perceive naturally the stakes underlying people and situations. You are reserved by nature, you favour emotions and inner life, leaving challenges and audacity to other people. You frequently maintain a certain distance and you share your true feelings with few intimate friends only. It is probably because you know that genuine communication is a difficult exercise. Everything in your realm is sheer subtlety and nuance. The danger is that you may escape realities and indulge in indolence without fulfilling your responsibilities. This is the other side of the coin of your extraordinary sensitivity and your exceptional clear-sightedness. You feel in tune with few people. However, this selectivity forges relationships that are long-lasting because they are natural and genuine. N. B.: when the birth time is unknown, (12:00 PM (unknown)), these portrait excerpts do not take into account the parameters derived from the time, which means, the domification (Ascendant, astrological houses, etc.). Nonetheless, these analyses remain accurate in any case. Regarding the sources of the birth data in our possession, kindly note that the pages we publish constitute a starting point for more detailed research, even though they seem useful to us. When the sources are contradictory, which occurs rarely, after having analysed them, we choose the most reliable one. Sometimes, we publish a birth date just because it is made available, but we do not claim that is it the best one, by no means.
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]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Harald Sack", "Harald Sack →" ]	2021-07-18T17:37:10		en	http://blog.yovisto.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/sci-hi-blog-icon.png		http://scihi.org/thomas-kuhn-scientific-revolutions/	On July 18, 1922, American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born. He is most famous for his controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term “paradigm shift“, which has since become an English-language idiom. “Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.” — Thomas Kuhn, Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research? (1970) Thomas Kuhn – Early Years Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Samuel L. Kuhn, who was trained as a hydraulic engineer at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and his wife Minette. He attended the Hessian Hills School in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, a liberal school that encouraged students to think independently, and graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, CT, in 1940, where he became aware of his serious interest in mathematics and physics. He obtained his B.S. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943 with summa cum laude. After graduation, he worked on radar for the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard and later for the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development in Europe. He returned to Harvard at the end of the war, obtained his master’s degree in physics in 1946, and worked toward a PhD degree in the same department, which he obtained in 1949 under the supervision of John Van Vleck. According to his autobiographical notes, his three years of total academic freedom as a Harvard Junior Fellow were crucial in allowing him to switch from physics to the history and philosophy of science. “Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.” — Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) Seeing through the Eyes of the Author From 1948 to 1956, Kuhn taught a course in the history of science at Harvard at the suggestion of university president James Conant. His encounter with classical texts, especially Aristotle’s Physics, was a crucial experience for him. He realized that it was a great mistake to read and judge an ancient scientific text from the perspective of current science and that one could not really understand it unless one got inside the mind of its author and saw the world through his eyes, through the conceptual framework he employed to describe phenomena. This understanding shaped his later historical and philosophical studies.[2] “Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense… that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way.” — Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) The History of Science This led Kuhn to concentrate on history of science and in due course he was appointed to an assistant professorship in general education and the history of science. During this period his work focussed on eighteenth century matter theory and the early history of thermodynamics. Kuhn then turned to the history of astronomy, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution.[3] After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. Kuhn interviewed and tape recorded Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before Bohr’s death.[4] At Berkeley, he wrote and published (in 1962) his best known and most influential work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. He served as the president of the History of Science Society from 1969-70. In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In 1994 Kuhn was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in 1996 in Cambridge, Massachussetts, at age 73.[8] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The central idea of his extraordinarily influential — and controversial — book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that the development of science is driven, in normal periods of science, by adherence to what Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’. The functions of a paradigm are to supply puzzles for scientists to solve and to provide the tools for their solution. A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’. Crisis is followed by a scientific revolution if the existing paradigm is superseded by a rival. Kuhn claimed that science guided by one paradigm would be ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a different paradigm, by which is meant that there is no common measure for assessing the different scientific theories.[3] Paradigm Shift The enormous impact of Kuhn’s work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides “paradigm shift“, Kuhn popularized the word “paradigm” itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics and the work of Georg Lichtenberg to its current broader meaning,[5] coined the term “normal science” to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term “scientific revolutions” in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single “Scientific Revolution” in the late Renaissance. The frequent use of the phrase “paradigm shift” has made scientists more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that Kuhn’s analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced that evolution. The Process of Scientific Change Kuhn explains the process of scientific change as the result of various phases of paradigm change. Phase 1: It exists only once and is the pre-paradigm phase, in which there is no consensus on any particular theory. This phase is characterized by several incompatible and incomplete theories. Consequently, most scientific inquiry takes the form of lengthy books, as there is no common body of facts that may be taken for granted. Phase 2: Normal science begins, in which puzzles are solved within the context of the dominant paradigm. As long as there is consensus within the discipline, normal science continues. Over time, progress in normal science may reveal anomalies, facts that are difficult to explain within the context of the existing paradigm. Phase 3: If the paradigm proves chronically unable to account for anomalies, the community enters a crisis period. Crises are often resolved within the context of normal science. However, after significant efforts of normal science within a paradigm fail, science may enter the next phase. Phase 4: Paradigm shift, or scientific revolution, is the phase in which the underlying assumptions of the field are reexamined and a new paradigm is established. Phase 5: Post-Revolution, the new paradigm’s dominance is established and so scientists return to normal science, solving puzzles within the new paradigm. Impact The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time. Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines, but also inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought it closer to the history of science. Years after the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn dropped the concept of a paradigm and began to focus on the semantic aspects of scientific theories. In particular, Kuhn focuses on the taxonomic structure of scientific kind terms. As a consequence, a scientific revolution is not defined as a ‘change of paradigm’ anymore, but rather as a change in the taxonomic structure of the theoretical language of science Philosophy of Science: Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, lecture 1, [12] References and Further Reading:
7992	dbpedia	1	87	https://us.ukessays.com/essays/sciences/scientific-revolutions-thomas-kuhns-theories-of-science.php	en	Scientific Revolutions: Thomas Kuhn's Theories of Science	https://us.ukessays.com/s/ukessays.gif	https://us.ukessays.com/s/ukessays.gif	[ "https://us.ukessays.com/images/icons/ukessays-logo.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/us.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/homepage/link-boxes/fair-use.jpg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/homepage/link-boxes/sign-in.jpg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/us.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/article/service-1.jpg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/article/service-2.jpg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/article/service-3.jpg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/humanity-university.png", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/ak-logo.png", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/footer/the-times-logo.png", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/footer/independent-logo.png", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/footer/bbc-logo.png", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/footer/daily-mail-logo.png", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/us.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/uk.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/ae.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/bh.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/kw.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/sa.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/qa.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/sg.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/hk.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/om.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/202.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/footer/footer-payment-logos.png", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/uk.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/us.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/ae.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/sa.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/bh.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/kw.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/om.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/qa.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/sg.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/hk.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Business Bliss FZE" ]	2023-11-06T20:30:17+00:00	The Scientific Revolutions and its Structure  In this essay I am going to discuss what the scientific revolution was and who was of importance at that time. I am also going to discu	en	/apple-touch-icon.png		https://us.ukessays.com/essays/sciences/scientific-revolutions-thomas-kuhns-theories-of-science.php	The Scientific Revolutions and its Structure In this essay I am going to discuss what the scientific revolution was and who was of importance at that time. I am also going to discuss more about Thomas Kuhn’s theories of science and discuss Karl Poppers theories of science. I am also going to give my outlook on the scientific revolution, the problems that Khun and Popper faced during their discoveries, and the most talked about theories from Kuhn through out this essay. HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Scientific Revolution had many great minds that made an impact at the time and continued to where we are today in science, medicien, and technology. Some of the important thinkers of the Scientific Revolution were; Andreas Vesalius, Giordano Bruno, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Paracelsus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Nicolaus Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton. They all had one thing in common being very smart thinkers and changing the way for the discovery of modern science. A influential philosopher of science came to be known in the twentieth century. Some scientis say he was the most influential one of time. His name is Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was and still is known for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This book not only talks about the “Paradigm Shift” (which I will bring up later in this essay) but this book also changed the way mankind thinks about how mankind attempts to understand the world in an organized and structured way. Another influential philosopher of science in the twentieth century was Karl Popper (1902-1994) born in Australia. He was well known for his theory of Criterion of falsifiability. This means that, in the philosophy of science, a standard of evaluation of putatively scientific theories, according to which a theory is genuinely scientific only if it is possible in principle to establish that it is false (Britannica). Now both philosophers explained how the philosophy of science was bias towards physics by scientist. Karl Popper explained that no amount of data points could really prove a theory. However, a single key data point can disprove it. A few theories that help this falsification were quantum mechanics and relativity. As science evolves falsification become less reliable and more complicated. A main reason falsification has become less reliable is that the modern science is based on models and not theories. Modern science has test that are ran, data that is collected, retested, and test that are solved and/or gives us prof and facts. These models can be retested and have different variables added to the models, which then lead to different results. When it comes to Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific progress better know as a “paradigm shift” there was an objection to it by the scientific community. Philosopher Arun Bala accused Thomas Kuhn of having being biased towards the Western civilization. Thomas Kuhn responded in writing: “[O]nly the civilizations that descend from Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe…No other place and time has supported the very special communities from which scientific productivity comes.” (Kuhn 12). There were others who question and accused Thomas Kuhn. However, I enjoyed reading what Thomas Kuhn wrote to Philosopher Arun Bala. I felt Thomas Kuhn was polite, forward, and truthful in his words. Kuhn believes the paradigms are incommensurable, even though they may provide different explanations of the same phenomenon, such as the different definitions of mass in Einsteinian versus Newtonian physics (Adams 17). Thomas Kuhn’s scientific theories had limitations because his theories could not account for past scientific advancements that happened outside of the “paradigm shift”. Now lets talk about Thomas Kuhn’s theory of how the “paradigm shift” and came to be. Thomas Kuhn talks about normal science, but what really is normal science? Normal science “means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice” (Kuhn 12). However there can be a shift in normal science meaning new theories and/or paradigms can be allowed. When this occurs a shift takes place with either theory or fact. When this occurs there is a cycle in a paradigm shift; first is the pre-science, second is the normal science, third is the model drift, fourth is the model crisis, fifth is the model revolution, and last it the paradigm change. The one cycle that I find the most interesting is the model crisis. The model crisis is when the model drift is broken. It can no longer be a reliable guide to solving the problem. The other steps were also of importance for instance pre-science is a non-workable step. Normal science is when there is a baseline for understanding a theory that works. Model drift is where we start to understand what is going on in the experiment but the end results cannot be explained and the results do not make sense. Model revolution begins when a new model is thought of because the recent one did not work. Finally you have the paradigm change where a new idea emerges from an old one, and a shift occurs. I find this to hold true in real life science experiments. As Thomas Kuhn said I have argued so far only that paradigms are constitutive of science. Now I wish to display a sense in which they are constitutive of nature as well (Godfrey-Smith 03). This then leads to Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shift” theory to continue to be in favor of science experiments today. Thomas Kuhn said “he was convinced that not only are there scientificrevolutions but also that they have a structure”(Hacking 12). Which then leads me back to the Scientific Revolution, because these brilliant philosophers’ would not have made great advancements in science like they did. The Scientific Revolution was and is the biggest shift in the world of science since modern science. There were deveolpments in astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and medicine that changed the views of society. Britiancica’s definition of the scientific revolution is drastic change in scientific thought that took place during the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries (Britannica). This unfolded in Europe around 1550-1700 this was towards the end of the Renaissance era. This was the improvement for how we thought and how the world was ran. Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) was the person to start the Scientific Revolution with his theory that the sun is at the centered of the Universe and that the Earth is on an axis that spins around once daily. Then came Issac Newton (1642-1727) whos theories where on Universal Laws. In mechanics, his three laws of motion, the basic principles of modern physics, resulted in the formulation of the law of universal gravitation (Britannica). Towards the end of the eighteenth century the scientific revolution community name this era “Age of Reflection”. These scientific views changed the way society worked at that time. People began to question many things even what the leaders where telling them, some even questioned religion. This gave people a sense of freedom of thinking outside the normal every day life. Along with the good points of the Scientific Revolution there was some theories and discoveries that created war, “It is stated that the scientific revolution has made wars irrational and deprived diplomacy of it most important tool, which is plausible war threats, culminating in the discovery of nuclear bombs and ocean-spanning missiles” (Rabinowitch 63). Unfortunately there will always be people in this world that will use science for advancement and war. Hopefully as we evolve we can move past science being in the wrong hands of people. CONCLUSION The philosophers and the scientist, men/woman who lead the way for the scientific revolution made great leaps and bounds in the world of science as we know today. If it was not for these men/women the world would not be where we are today with out technology and science discoveries. What if Nicholas Copernicus never discovered that the sun is centered? Think about the ripple in our time. Where would we be at today? I believe things happened and happen for a reason especially when it comes to the field of science and technology. I look forward to seeing in my lifetime where science will lead us the next. I feel there is so much more to learn from the philosophers and scientist, plus there are so many more that contributed to the Scientific Revolution. I wonder and have a gut feeling that there were people from those times who thought of these theories and experiments to have someone else take credit for them. If we ever found out the truth I am sure there would be a shift in the science world, as we know. Thank you for taking the time to read my essay I hope I was able to shed some light on the Scientific Revolution, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, and their theories that made them famous both positive and negative in the science world. Notes Please note that any direct quotes from Thomas Kuhn’s texts are written in their original form, which may contain grammar mistakes according to twenty-first century grammar rules. 2. I feel that I was trying to get out some main points of the Scientific Revolution, and Thomas Kuhn and I feel that it was so much more than what I talked about. Works Cited
7992	dbpedia	1	91	https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-revolutions/	en	Scientific Revolutions (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)			[ "https://plato.stanford.edu/symbols/sep-man-red.png", "https://plato.stanford.edu/symbols/sepman-icon.jpg", "https://plato.stanford.edu/symbols/sepman-icon.jpg", "https://plato.stanford.edu/symbols/inpho.png", "https://plato.stanford.edu/symbols/pp.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	1. The Problems of Revolution and Innovative Change The difficulties in identifying and conceptualizing scientific revolutions involve many of the most challenging issues in epistemology, methodology, ontology, philosophy of language, and even value theory. With revolution we immediately confront the problem of deep, possibly noncumulative, conceptual and practical change, now in modern science itself, a locus that Enlightenment thinkers would have found surprising. And since revolution is typically driven by new results, or by a conceptual-cum-social reorganization of old ones, often highly unexpected, we also confront the hard problem of understanding creative innovation. Third, major revolutions supposedly change the normative landscape of research by altering the goals and methodological standards of the enterprise, so we face also the difficult problem of relating descriptive claims to normative claims and practices, and changes in the former to changes in the latter. Comparing the world of business innovation and economic theory provides a perspective on the difficulty of these problems, for both the sciences and the industrial technologies change rapidly and sometimes deeply (in the aforementioned ways), thanks to what might be termed “innovation push”—both the pressure to innovate (to find and solve new problems, thereby creating new designs) and the pressure to accommodate innovation (see, e.g., Christensen 1997; Christensen and Raynor, 2003; Arthur 2009). In a market economy, as in science, there is a premium on change driven by innovation. Yet most economists have treated innovations as exogenous factors—as accidental, economically contingent events that come in from outside the economic system to work their effects. It is surprising that only recently has innovation become a central topic of economic theorists. Decades ago, the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter characterized economic innovation as the process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. [1942, chap. VII; Schumpeter’s emphasis] Unfortunately, economists largely ignored this sort of claim (made also by a few others) until the recent development of economic growth theory (e.g., Robert Solow, Paul Romer, and W. Brian Arthur: see Beinhocker 2006 and Warsh 2006). The result was an inability of economic models to account for economic innovation endogenously and, thereby, to gain an adequate understanding of the generation of economic wealth. The parallel observation holds for philosophy of science. Here, too, the leading philosophers of science until the 1960s—the logical empiricists and the Popperians—rejected innovation as a legitimate topic, even though it is the primary intellectual driver of scientific change and producer of the wealth of skilled knowledge that results. The general idea is that the so-called context of discovery, the context of creatively constructing new theories, experimental designs, etc., is only of historical and psychological interest, not epistemological interest, and that the latter resides in the epistemic status of the “final products” of investigation. On this view, convincing confirmation or refutation of a claim enables scientists to render an epistemic judgment that detaches it from its historical context. This judgment is based on the logical relations of theories and evidence rather than on history or psychology. According to this traditional view, there exists a logic of justification but not a logic of discovery. The distinction has nineteenth-century antecedents (Laudan 1980). Cohen and Nagel (1934) contended that to take historical path into account as part of the epistemic assessment was to confuse historical questions with logical questions and thereby to commit what they called a “genetic fallacy.” However, the context of discovery / context of justification distinction (or family of distinctions) is often attributed to Reichenbach (1938). (See the entry on Reichenbach. For recent discussion see Schickore and Steinle, 2006.) Today there are entire academic industries devoted to various aspects of the topic of scientific revolutions, whether political or scientific, yet we have no adequate general theory or model of revolutions in either sphere. This article will focus on Thomas Kuhn’s conception of scientific revolutions, which relies partly on analogies to political revolution and to religious conversion. Kuhn’s is by far the most discussed account of scientific revolutions and did much to reshape the field of philosophy of science, given his controversial claims about incommensurability, rationality, objectivity, progress, and realism. For a general account of Kuhn’s work, see the entry on Kuhn. See also Hoyningen-Huene (1993), and Bird (2001). 2. History of the Concept of Scientific Revolution What history lies behind the terms ‘revolution’ and ‘scientific revolution’? The answer is an intriguing mix of accounts of physical phenomena, political fortunes, and conceptions of chance, fate, and history. Originally a term applying to rotating wheels and including the revolution of the celestial bodies (as in Copernicus’ title: De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium) and, more metaphorically, the wheel of fortune, ‘revolution’ was eventually transferred to the political realm. The term later returned to science at the metalevel, to describe developments within science itself (e.g., “the Copernican Revolution”). Christopher Hill, historian of seventeenth-century Britain and of the so-called English Revolution in particular, writes: Conventional wisdom has it that the word ‘revolution’ acquired its modern political meaning only after 1688. Previously it had been an astronomical and astrological term limited to the revolution of the heavens, or to any complete circular motion. [Hill 1990, 82] Hill himself dates the shift to the governmental realm somewhat earlier, pointing out that the notion of overturning was also present in groups of reformers who aspired to return human society to an earlier, ideal state: overturning as returning. This conception of revolution as overturning was compatible with a cyclical view of history as a continuous process. It was in the socio-political sphere that talk of revolution as a successful uprising and overturning became common. In this sense, a revolution is a successful revolt, ‘revolution’ being an achievement or product term, whereas ‘to revolt’ is a process verb. The fully modern conception of revolution as involving a break from the past—an abrupt, humanly-made overturning rather than a natural overturning—depended on the linear, progressive conception of history that perhaps originated in the Italian Renaissance, gained strength during the Protestant Reformation and the two later English revolutions, and became practically dogma among the champions of the scientific Enlightenment. The violent English Revolution of the 1640s gave political revolution a bad name, whereas the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a bloodless, negotiated compromise, reversed this reputation. 2.1 Scientific Revolution as a Topic for Historiography of Science When did the term ‘revolution’ become a descriptor of specifically scientific developments? In the most thorough treatment of the history of the concept of scientific revolution, I. B. Cohen (1985) notes that the French word revolution was being used in early eighteenth-century France to mark significant developments. By mid-century it was pretty clear that Clairaut, D’Alembert, Diderot and others sometimes applied the term to scientific developments, including Newton’s achievement but also to Descartes’ rejection of Aristotelian philosophy. Cohen fails to note that Émilie Du Châtelet preceded them, in her Institutions de Physique of 1740, where she distinguished scientific from political revolutions (Châtelet and Zinnser 2009, p. 118). However, the definition of revolution in the Encyclopédie of the French philosophes was still political. Toward the end of the century, Condorcet could speak of Lavoisier as having brought about a revolution in chemistry; and, indeed, Lavoisier and his associates also applied the term to their work, as did Cuvier to his. Meanwhile, of course, Kant, in The Critique of Pure Reason (first edition 1781), spoke of his “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy. In fact, Cohen (1985) and Ian Hacking (2012) credit Kant with originating the idea of a scientific revolution, although Kant had read Du Châtelet. Interestingly, for Kant (1798) political revolutions are, by nature, unlawful, whereas Locke, in his social contract theory, had permitted them under special circumstances. It was during the twentieth century that talk of scientific revolutions slowly gained currency. One can find scientists using the term occasionally. For example, young Einstein, in a letter to his friend Habicht, describes his new paper on light quanta as “very revolutionary” (Klein 1963, 59). The idea of radical breaks was foreign to such historians of science as Pierre Duhem and George Sarton, but Alexandre Koyré, in Études Galiléennes (1939), rejected inductivist history, interpreting the work of Galileo as a sort of Platonic intellectual transformation. (See Zambelli (2016) for a revealing account of Koyré’s own background.) In The Origins of Modern Science: 1300–1800 (1949 and later editions), widely used as a course text, Herbert Butterfield, a political historian working mainly from secondary sources, wrote a compact summary of the Scientific Revolution, one that emphasized the importance of conceptual transformation rather than the infusion of new empirical information. The anti-whiggism that he had advocated in his The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) became a major constraint on the new historiography of science, especially in the Anglophone world. In Origins, Butterfield applied the revolution label not only to the Scientific Revolution and to several of its components but also to “The Postponed Revolution in Chemistry” (a chapter title), as if it were a delayed component of the Scientific Revolution. His history ended there. A revolution for Butterfield is a major event that founds a scientific field. Taken together, these revolutions founded modern science. As the title of his book suggests, he was concerned with origins, not with what comes after the founding. In the Introduction he famously (or notoriously) stated that the Scientific Revolution outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom. For Butterfield, the Scientific Revolution was a watershed event on the scale of total human history, an event that, somewhat ironically and somewhat like Christianity according to its believers, enabled the sciences, to some degree, to escape from history and thereby to become exceptional among human endeavors. Subsequently, A. Rupert Hall, a full-fledged historian of science who worked from primary sources, published The Scientific Revolution: 1500–1800 (Hall 1954). Soon many other scholars spoke of the Scientific Revolution, the achievements of the period from Copernicus to Newton, including such luminaries as Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Huygens, Boyle, and Leibniz. Then Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend challenged received views of science and made talk of revolutionary breaks and incommensurability central to the emerging new field of history and philosophy of science. They asserted that major conceptual changes lay in the future of mature, modern sciences as well as in their past. Kuhn (1962, ch. IX) contended that there will be no end to scientific revolutions as long as systematic scientific investigation continues, for they are a necessary vehicle of ongoing scientific progress–necessary to break out of dated conceptual frameworks. In other words, there are both founding revolutions, in something like Butterfield’s sense of threshold events to maturity, and a never-ending series of later revolutions within an ongoing field, no matter how mature it is. However, soon after Structure, Kuhn had second thoughts and eventually abandoned the Butterfield conception of revolution, on the ground that even his so-called preparadigm schools had their paradigms (Kuhn 1974, 460, note 4; details below). So multiple Kuhnian paradigms in long-term competition now became possible. The Scientific Revolution was the topic around which the field of history of science itself came to maturity. Kuhn’s popularization of the idea that even the mature natural sciences undergo deep conceptual change stimulated much general intellectual interest in the history of science during the 1960s and 1970s. The revolution frame of reference was also a boon to historiographical narrative itself (see Cohen 1985 and Nickles 2006). And by challenging the received, quasi-foundational, Enlightenment conception of science, history of science and related philosophies of science gained great cultural significance for a time. In recent decades, however, many historians have contested even the claim that there was a single, coherent development appropriately called “the Scientific Revolution.” Steven Shapin (1996, 1) captured the unease in his opening sentence: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” Everyone agrees that a series of rapid developments of various kinds took place during the period in question, but the operative word here is ‘various’. One difficulty is that no one has succeeded in capturing a 150-year (or more) period of work in an insightful, widely accepted characterization that embraces the important changes in theory, method, practices, instrumentation, social organization, and social status ranging over such a wide variety of projects. The very attempt has come to seem reductionist. Older styles of historical writing were characterized by grand narratives such as “the mechanization of the world picture” (Dijksterhuis 1961; original, Dutch edition, 1950) and humanity’s passage from subjective superstition to objectivity and mathematical precision (Gillispie 1960). Philosophically oriented writers attempted to find unity and progress in terms of the discovery of a new, special scientific method. Today even most philosophers of science dismiss the claim that there exists a powerful, general, scientific method, the discovery of which explains the Scientific Revolution and the success of modern science. Quite the contrary: effective scientific methods are themselves the product of painstaking work at the frontier—scientific results methodized—and are hence typically laden with the technical content of the specialty in question. There is no content-neutral, thereby general and timeless method that magically explains how those results were achieved (Schuster and Yeo 1986, Nickles 2009). Continuity theorists such as Pierre Duhem (1914), John Herman Randall (1940), A. C. Crombie (1959, 1994), and more recent historians such as Peter Dear (2001) have pointed out a second major difficulty in speaking of “the Scientific Revolution.” It is hard to locate the sharp break from medieval and Renaissance practices that discontinuity historians from Koyré to Kuhn have celebrated. When examined closely in their own cultural context, all the supposed revolutionaries are found to have had one foot in the old traditions and to have relied heavily on the work of predecessors. In this vein, J. M. Keynes famously remarked that Newton was “the last of the magicians,” not the first of the age of reason (Keynes 1947). Still, most historians and philosophers would agree that the rate of change of scientific development increased notably during this period. Hence, Shapin, despite his professional reservations, could still write an instructive, synthetic book about the Scientific Revolution. The most thorough appraisal of historiographical treatments of the Scientific Revolution is H. Floris Cohen’s (1994). The Scientific Revolution supposedly encompassed all of science or natural philosophy, as it then existed, with major social implications, as opposed to more recent talk of revolutions within particular technical fields. Have there been other multidisciplinary revolutions? Some have claimed the existence of a “second scientific revolution” in the institutional structure of the sciences in the decades around 1800, especially in France, others (including Kuhn 1977a, ch. 3) of a multidisciplinary revolution in the “Baconian sciences” (chemistry, electricity, magnetism, heat, etc.) during roughly the same time period. Enrico Bellone 1980), Kuhn, and others Kuhn have focused on the tremendous increase in mathematical abstraction and sophistication during the early-to-mid nineteenth century that essentially created what we know as mathematical physics. Still others have claimed that there was a general revolution in the sciences in the decades around 1900. (See also Cohen 1985, chap. 6, for discussion of these claims.) For many historians, ‘the Scientific Revolution’ now describes a topic area rather than a clearly demarcated event. They find it safer to divide the Scientific Revolution into several more topic- and project-specific developments. However, in their unusually comprehensive history of science textbook, Peter Bowler and Iwan Morus (2005) query of practically every major development they discuss whether or not it was a genuine revolution at all, at least by Kuhnian standards. More recently, David Wootton’s (2015) is a revisionist account that returns to a more heroic understanding of the Scientific Revolution. 2.2 Scientific Revolution as a Topic for Philosophy Commitment to the existence of deep scientific change does not, for all experts, equate to a commitment to the existence of revolutions in Kuhn’s sense. Consider the historically–oriented philosopher Stephen Toulmin (1953, 1961, 1972), who wrote of “ideals of natural order,” principles so basic that they are normally taken for granted during an epoch but that are subject to eventual historical change. Such was the change from the Aristotelian to the Newtonian conception of inertia. Yet Toulmin remained critical of revolution talk. Although the three influential college course texts that he co-authored with June Goodfield recounted the major changes that resulted in the development of several modern sciences (Toulmin and Goodfield 1961, 1962, 1965), these authors could write, already about the so-called Copernican Revolution: We must now look past the half-truths of this caricature, to what Copernicus attempted and what he in fact achieved. For in science, as in politics, the term ‘revolution’—with its implication that a whole elaborate structure is torn down and reconstructed overnight—can be extremely misleading. In the development of science, as we shall see, thorough-going revolutions are just about out of the question. [1961, 164] The Toulmin and Goodfield quotation invites us to ask, When did talk of scientific revolutions enter philosophy of science in a significant way? And the answer seems to be: there is a sprinkling of uses of the term ‘scientific revolution’ and its cognates prior to Kuhn, but these were ordinary expressions that did not yet have the status of a technical term. Given the prominence of the topic today, it is surprising that we do not find the term in Philipp Frank’s account of the positivist discussion group in Vienna in the early twentieth century. However, Frank (1957) does speak of their perception of a “crisis” in modern physics caused by the undermining of classical mechanics by special relativity and quantum mechanics, and it was common to speak of this or that worldview or world picture (Weltanschauung, Weltbild), e.g., the electromagnetic vs. the Einsteinian vs. the mechanical picture. Nor do we find talk of scientific revolutions in the later Vienna Circle, even after the diaspora following the rise of Hitler. The technical term does not appear in Karl Popper’s Logik der Forschung (1934) nor in his 1959 English expansion of that work as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, at least not important enough to be indexed. Hans Reichenbach (1951) speaks rather casually of the revolutions in physics. The technical term is not in Ernest Nagel’s The Structure of Science (1961). Nor is it in Stephen Pepper’s World Hypotheses (1942). It plays no significant role in N. R. Hanson’s Patterns in Discovery (1958), despite its talk of the theory-ladenness of observation and perceptual Gestalt switches. Meanwhile, there were, of course, a few widely-read works in the background that spoke of major ontological changes associated with the rise of modern science, especially E. A. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1924). Burtt’s book influenced Koyré, who, in turn, influenced Kuhn. In his retrospective autobiographical lecture at Cambridge in 1953, Popper did refer to the dramatic political and intellectual events of his youth as revolutionary: [T]he air was full of revolutionary slogans and ideas, and new and often wild theories. Among the theories which interested me Einstein’s theory of relativity was no doubt by far the most important. The others were Marx’s theory of history, Freud’s psycho-analysis, and Alfred Adler’s so-called ‘individual psychology’. [Popper 1957] And during the 1960s and 1970s, Popper indicated that, according to his “critical approach” to science and philosophy, all science should be revolutionary—revolution in permanence. But this was a tame conception of revolution compared to Kuhn’s, given Popper’s two logical criteria for a progressive new theory: (a) it must logically conflict with its predecessor and overthrow it; yet (b) “a new theory, however revolutionary, must always be able to explain fully the success of its predecessor” (Popper 1975). As we shall see, Kuhn’s model of revolution rejects both these constraints (depending on how one interprets his incommensurability claim) as well as the idea of progress toward final, big, theoretical truths about the universe. Kuhn dismissed Popper’s notion of revolution in perpetuity as a contradiction in terms, on the ground that a revolution is something that overthrows a long and well–established order, in violation of the rules of that order. Kuhn (1970) also vehemently rejected Popper’s doctrine of falsification, which implied that a theory could be rejected in isolation, without anything to replace it. According to Popper, at any time there may be several competing theories being proposed and subsequently refuted by failed empirical tests—rather like several balloons being launched, over time, and then being shot down, one by one. Popper’s view thus faces the difficulty, among others, of explaining the long-term coherence that historians find in scientific research. Beginning in the 1960s, several philosophers and historians addressed this difficulty by proposing the existence of larger units (than theories) of and for analysis. Kuhn’s paradigms, Imre Lakatos’s research programmes, Larry Laudan’s research traditions (Lakatos 1970, Laudan 1977), and the widespread use of terms such as ‘conceptual scheme’, ‘conceptual framework’, ‘worldview’, and Weltanschauung (Suppe 1974) instanced this felt need for larger-sized units among Anglo-American writers, as had Toulmin’s old concept of ideals of natural order. These stable formations correspondingly raised the eventual prospect of larger-scale instabilities, for an abrupt change in such a formation would surely be more dramatic, more revolutionary, than a Popperian theory change. However, none of the other writers endorsed Kuhn’s radical conception of scientific revolution. Meanwhile, Michel Foucault 1963, 1966, 1969, 1975), working in a French tradition, was positing the existence of “discursive formations” or epistemes, sets of deep-structural cultural rules that define the limits of discourse during a period. Section 5 returns to this theme. 2.3 Criteria for Identifying Scientific Revolutions I. B. Cohen (1985, chap. 2) lays down four historical tests, four necessary conditions, for the correct attribution of a revolution. First, the scientists involved in the development must perceive themselves as revolutionaries, and relevant contemporaries must agree that a revolution is underway. Second, documentary histories must count it as a revolution. Third, later historians and philosophers must agree with this attribution and, fourth, so must later scientists working in that field or its successors. By including both reports from the time of the alleged revolution and later historiographical judgments, Cohen excludes people who claimed in their day to be revolutionaries but who had insufficient impact on the field to sustain the judgment of history. He also guards against whiggish, post hoc attributions of revolution to people who had no idea that they were revolutionaries. His own four examples of big scientific revolutions all have an institutional dimension: The Scientific Revolution featured the rise of scientific societies and journals, the second was the aforementioned revolution in measurement from roughly 1800 to 1850 (which Kuhn, too, called “the second scientific revolution”; 1977, 220). Third is the rise of university graduate research toward the end of that century. Fourth is the post-World War II explosion in government funding of science and its institutions. Cohen sets the bar high. Given Copernicus’ own conservatism and the fact that few people paid attention to his work for half a century, the Copernican achievement was not a revolution by Cohen’s lights. Or if there was a revolution, should it not be attributed to Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes? This thought further problematizes the notion of revolution, for science studies experts as well as scientists themselves know that scientific and technological innovation can be extremely nonlinear in the sense that a seemingly small, rather ordinary development may eventually open up an entire new domain of research problems or a powerful new approach. Consider Planck’s semi-classical derivation of the empirical blackbody radiation law in 1900, which, under successively deeper theoretical derivations by himself and (mainly) others over the next two and a half decades, became a pillar of the revolutionary quantum theory. As Kuhn (1978) shows, despite the flood of later attributions to Planck, it is surprisingly difficult, on historical and philosophical grounds, to justify the claim that he either was, or saw himself as, a revolutionary in 1900 and for many years thereafter. (Kuhn 2000b offers a short summary.) Augustine Brannigan (1981) and Robert Olby (1985) defend similar claims about Mendel’s alleged discovery of Mendelian inheritance. These examples suggest that Cohen’s account of scientific revolution (and Kuhn’s) is tied too closely to the idea of political revolution in placing so much weight on the intentions of the generators. In the last analysis, many would agree, revolution, like speciation in biology, is a retrospective judgment, a judgment of eventual consequences, not something that is always directly observable as such in its initial phases, e.g., in the stated the intentions of its authors. On the other hand, a counterintuitive implication of this consequentialist view of revolutions is that there can be revolution without revolt (assuming that revolt is a deliberate course of action), revolutionary work without authors, so to speak, or at least revolutionary in eventual meaning despite the authors’ intentions. Then why not just speak of evolution rather than revolution in such cases? For, as we know by analogy from evolutionary biology, in the long run evolution can be equally transformative, even moreso (see below). A related point is that, insofar as revolutions are highly nonlinear, it is difficult to ascribe to them any particular reason or cause; for, as indicated, the triggering events can be quite ordinary work, work that unexpectedly opens up new vistas for exploration. A small cause may have an enormous effect. To be sure, the state of the relevant scientific system must be such that the events do function as triggers, but we need not expect that such a system always be readily identifiable as one in crisis in Kuhn’s sense. Rather, the highly nonlinear revolutionary developments can be regarded as statistical fluctuations out of a “noisy” background of ordinary work. At any rate, on this view it is a mistake to think that explaining revolutions requires locating a momentous breakthrough (Nickles 2012a and b). What of the common requirement that revolutions be rapid, event-like, unlike the century-and-a half-long Scientific Revolution? Brad Wray (2011, 42f) answers that there is no reason that a revolution need be an abrupt event. What is important is how thoroughgoing the change is and that it be change at the community level rather than a Gestalt switch experienced by certain individuals. (After the original publication of Structure, Kuhn acknowledged his confusion in attributing Gestalt switches to the community as a whole as well as to individuals.) On Wray’s view, evolution and revolution are not necessarily opposed categories. And with this understanding, the Toulmin and Goodfield comment quoted above becomes compatible with revolutionary transformation, which, not surprisingly, takes time to become thoroughgoing. Meanwhile, the Butterfield quotation suggests that what counts as a striking change is a matter of historical scale. By our lights today, 150 years is a long time; but, against the long sweep of total human history, a change of the magnitude of the Scientific Revolution was quite rapid. Perhaps today’s rapid pace of scientific and technological innovation makes us impatient with slower-scaled developments in the past. And it is surely the case the some of the slow, large-scale transformations now underway are scarcely visible to us. Finally, what of Butterfield’s criterion of broader social impacts? Kuhn retained this criterion in The Copernican Revolution, but revolutions increasingly become changes in specialist communities in his later work, since those communities insulate themselves from the larger society. In the chapter on the invisibility of revolutions in Structure, Kuhn tells us that a tiny subspecialty can undergo a revolution that looks like a cumulative change even to neighboring fields of the same scientific discipline. In this respect Kuhn remained an internalist. 3. Kuhn’s Early Account of Scientific Revolutions Although virtually no one in the science studies fields accepts Kuhn’s model in Structure as correct in detail, there has been a revival of interest in his views since his death and, more recently, in connection with the fiftieth anniversary in 2012 of the book’s original publication. Some examples are: the fiftieth anniversary edition of Structure itself, including a valuable introduction by Ian Hacking; Kuhn (2000a), a collection that records the later evolution of Kuhn’s thought; Sankey (1997); Bitbol (1997); Fuller (2000); Bird (2001); Friedman (2001); Andersen (2001); Sharrock and Read (2002); Nickles (2003a); González (2004); Soler et al. (2008); Agazzi (2008); Gattei (2008); Torres (2010); Wray (2011), Kindi and Arabatzis (2012), De Langhe (2013), Marcum (2015), and Richards and Daston (2016). Kuhn on revolutions has helped to shape many symposia on scientific realism and related matters, for example, Soler (2008) on contingency in the historical development of science and Rowbottom and Bueno (2011) on Bas van Fraassen’s (2002) treatment of stance, voluntarism, and the viability of empiricism. Since Kuhn’s work is discussed in some detail in other contributions to this Encyclopedia (see, especially, “Kuhn, Thomas”, and “The Incommensurability of Scientific Theories”), a brief account will suffice here. For a detailed reading guide to Structure, consult Preston (2008). 3.1 Kuhn’s Early Model of Scientific Development According to Kuhn in Structure, a loosely characterized group of activities, often consisting of competing schools, becomes a mature science when a few concrete problem solutions provide models for what good research is (or can be) in that domain. These exemplary problems-cum-solutions become the basis of a “paradigm” that defines what it is to do “normal science.” As its name suggests, normal science is the default state of a mature science and of the community of researchers who constitute it. The paradigm informs investigators what their domain of the world is like and practically guarantees that all legitimate problems can be solved in its terms. Normal science is convergent rather than divergent: it actively discourages revolutionary initiatives and essentially novel (unexpected) discoveries, for these threaten the paradigm. However, normal research is so detailed and focused that it is bound to turn up anomalous experimental and theoretical results, some of which will long resist the best attempts to resolve them. Given the historical contingencies involved in the formation of guiding paradigms as well as the fallibility of all investigators, it would be incredibly improbable for everything to end up working perfectly. According to Kuhn, anomalies are therefore to be expected. Historically, all paradigms and theory complexes face anomalies at all times. If and when persistent efforts by the best researchers fail to resolve the anomalies, the community begins to lose confidence in the paradigm and a crisis period ensues in which serious alternatives can now be entertained. If one of these alternatives shows sufficient promise to attract a dominant group of leading researchers away from the old paradigm, a paradigm shift or paradigm change occurs—and that is a Kuhnian revolution. The radicals accomplish this by replacing the former set of routine problems and problem-solving techniques (exemplars) by a new set of exemplars, making the old practices seem defective, or at least old fashioned. 3.2 Revolution as Incommensurable Paradigm Change The new paradigm overturns the old by displacing it as no longer a competent guide to future research. In the famous (or notorious)chapter X of Structure, Kuhn claims that the change is typically so radical that the two paradigms cannot be compared against the same goals and methodological standards and values. Moreover, the accompanying meaning shift of key terms, such as ‘simultaneous’, ‘mass’, and ‘force’ in physics, leads to communication breakdown. In effect, scientists on different sides of a paradigm debate “live in different worlds.” Kuhn speaks of scientists experiencing a kind of gestalt switch or religious conversion experience. The heated rhetoric of debate and the resulting social reorganization, he says, resemble those of a political revolution. “Like the choice between political institutions, that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life” (1970, 94). The comparison of scientific with political revolutions should not surprise, given the entangled history of the term ‘revolution’, but claiming such close similarity enraged philosophical and cultural critics of Kuhn. The typical paradigm change does not involve a large infusion of new empirical results, Kuhn tells us (chs. IX and X). Rather, it is a conceptual reorganization of otherwise familiar materials, as in the relativity revolution. A paradigm change typically changes goals, standards, linguistic meaning, key scientific practices, the way both the technical content and the relevant specialist community are organized, and the way scientists perceive the world. (For the often neglected practices dimension in Kuhn’s account, see Rouse, 2003.) Nor can we retain the old, linear, cumulative conception of scientific progress characteristic of Enlightenment thinking; for, Kuhn insists, attempts to to show that the new paradigm contains the old, either logically or in some limit or under some approximation, will be guilty of a fallacy of equivocation. The meaning change reflects the radical change in the assumed ontology of the world. A second Kuhnian objection to cumulative progress is what has come to be called “Kuhn loss” (see Post 1971, 229, n. 38). Rarely does the new paradigm solve all of the problems that its predecessor apparently solved. So even in this sense the new paradigm fails completely to enclose the old. The consequence, according to Kuhn, is that attempts to defend continuous, cumulative scientific progress by means of theory reduction or even a correspondence relationship (e.g., a limiting relationship) between a theory and its predecessor must fail. Revolutions produce discontinuities. Given all these changes, Kuhn claimed that the two competing paradigms are “incommensurable”, a technical term that he repeatedly attempted to clarify. Traditional appeals to empirical results and logical argument are insufficient to resolve the debate. For details of the incommensurability debate, see the entry “The Incommensurability of Scientific Theories.” as well as Hoyningen-Huene and Sankey (2001) as a sample of the large literature on incommensurability. Naturally, many thinkers of a logical empiricist or Popperian bent, or simply of an Enlightenment persuasion, were shocked by these claims and responded with a barrage of criticism—as if Kuhn had committed a kind of sacrilege by defiling the only human institution that could be trusted to provide the objective truth about the world. Today there is fairly wide agreement that some of Kuhn’s claims no longer look so radical. Meanwhile, Kuhn himself was equally shocked by the vehemence of the attacks and (to his mind) the willful distortion of his views (see, e.g., Lakatos and Musgrave 1970). In later papers and talks, he both clarified his views and softened some of his more radical claims. Critics reacted to the radical views of Paul Feyerabend (1962, 1975) in a somewhat similar manner. (For details, see the entry “Feyerabend, Paul.”) Given that cyclic theories of history have, for the most part, long given way to linear, progressive accounts, readers may be surprised at Kuhn critic, physicist Stephen Weinberg’s comment that Kuhn’s overall model is still, in a sense, cyclic (Weinberg 2001). In fact, Kuhn himself had already recognized this. After the founding paradigm in Kuhn’s account in Structure, we have normal science under a paradigm, then crisis, then revolution, then a new paradigm—a development that brings back a new period of normal science. At this abstract level of description, the model is indeed cyclic, but of course the new paradigm heads the science in question in a new direction rather than returning it to a previous state. Other commentators, including Marxists, have regarded Kuhn’s mechanism as dialectical, as illustrated by the succession of self-undermining developments in the theory of light, from a Newtonian particle theory to a wave theory to a new kind of wave-particle duality. (For the dialectical interpretation see especially Krajewski 1977 and Nowak 1980 on the idealizational approach to science, as originated by Karl Marx.) Somewhat ironically, Kuhn’s attempt to revolutionize the epistemology of science has had a wider socio-cultural impact than many scientific revolutions themselves. While some of Kuhn’s doctrines step into the postmodern era, he still had a foot in the Enlightenment, which helps to explain his dismay at the critical reaction to his work and to radical developments in the new-wave sociology of science of the 1970s and ‘80s. For, unlike many postmodernists (some of whom make use of his work), Kuhn retained a scientific exceptionalism. He did not doubt that the sciences have been uniquely successful since the Scientific Revolution. For him, unlike for many of his critics, revolutions in his radical sense were great epistemological leaps forward rather than deep scientific failures. On the science policy front, he intended his work to help preserve the integrity of this socially valuable enterprise. It is on science policy issues that Steve Fuller is most critical of Kuhn (Fuller 2000). The general problem presented by Kuhn’s critique of traditional philosophy of science is that, although the various sciences have been successful, we do not understand how they have accomplished this or even how to characterize this success. Enlightenment-style explanations have failed. For example, Kuhn and Feyerabend (1975), preceded by Popper, were among the first philosophers to expose the bankruptcy of the claim that it was the discovery of a special scientific method that explains that success, a view that is still widely taught in secondary schools today. And that conclusion (one that cheered those postmodernists who regard scientific progress as an illusion) left Kuhn and the science studies profession with the problem of how science really does work. To explain how and why it had been so successful became an urgent problem for him—again, a problem largely rejected as bogus by many science studies scholars other than philosophers. Another of Kuhn’s declared tasks in Structure was to solve the problem of social order for mature science, that is, how cohesive modern science (especially normal science) is possible (Barnes 1982, 2003). Yet another was to bring scientific discovery back into philosophical discussion by endogenizing it in his model, while denying the existence of a logic of discovery. Whereas the logical empiricists and Popper had excluded discovery issues from philosophy of science in favor of theory of confirmation or corroboration, Kuhn was critical of confirmation theory and supportive of historical and philosophical work on discovery. He argued that discoveries are temporally and cognitively structured and that they are an essential component of an epistemology of science. In Kuhnian normal science the problems are so well structured and the solutions so nearly guaranteed in terms of the resources of the paradigm that the problems reduce to puzzles (Nickles 2003b). Kuhn kept things under control there by denying that normal scientists seek essential innovation, for, as indicated above, major, unexpected discoveries threaten the extant paradigm and hence threaten crisis and revolution. So, even in normal science, Kuhn had to admit that major discoveries are unexpected challenges to the reigning paradigm. They are anomalous, even exogenous in the sense that they come as shocks from outside the normal system. But this is the working scientists’ point of view. As noted, normal science is bound to turn up difficulties that resist resolution, at least some of which are sooner or later recognized by the community. In Kuhn’s own view, as a historian and philosopher standing high above the fray, it is deliberate, systematic normal research that will most readily sow the seeds of revolution and hence of rapid scientific progress. According to the old musicians’ joke, the fastest way to Carnegie Hall is slow practice. For Kuhn the fastest way to revolutionary innovation is intensely detailed normal science. When it comes to revolution on Kuhn’s account, the social order breaks down dramatically. And here his strategy of taming creative normal research so as to make room for articulated discovery (the reduction of research problems to puzzles) also breaks down. Kuhn had to acknowledge that he had no idea how the scientists in extraordinary research contexts manage to come up with brilliant new ideas and techniques. This failure exacerbated his problem of explaining what sort of continuity underlies the revolutionary break that enables us to identify the event as a revolution within an ongoing field of inquiry. As he later wrote: Even those who have followed me this far will want to know how a value-based enterprise of the sort I have described can develop as a science does, repeatedly producing powerful new techniques for prediction and control. To that question, unfortunately, I have no answer at all…. [1977b, 332] 3.3 Progress through Revolutions Kuhn’s work on scientific revolutions raises difficult questions about whether science progresses and, if so, in what that progress consists. Kuhn asks (p. 60), “Why is progress a perquisite reserved almost exclusively for the activities we call science” and not for art, political theory, or philosophy? Early critics took him to deny scientific progress, because he rejected the traditional correspondence theory of truth and the related idea of cumulative progress toward a representational truth waiting out there for science to find it. For Kuhn the internalist, the technical goals of science are endogenously generated and change over time, rapidly during revolutions. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, Kuhn regarded revolutions as the most progressive components of his model of science. Unfortunately, he was not able to articulate fully in what that progress consists, given the issues of truth, incommensurability and Kuhn loss, a problem that those who reject convergent scientific realism still face. However, problem-solving know-how and success, including predictive precision, are major components of his answer. “[T]he unit of scientific achievement is the solved problem....” (p. 169). In a retreat from his most radical statements, Kuhn responded to critics by saying that we do possess a general set of scientific values that enables us, usually pretty easily, to order scientific works in historical time according to the degree in which they realize these values. A new paradigm, he says, must always treat successfully a serious anomaly left by the old one as well as opening up new questions for fruitful investigation. Kuhn’s emphasis on scientific practices, relative to the philosophical state of play in the 1960s, takes up some of the slack left by the rejection of strong realism. His emphasis on skilled practice may have been influenced by Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge (1958), with its “tacit knowing” component, although Kuhn denied that he found Polanyi’s account appealing (see, e.g., Baltas et al., 2000, pp. 296f). If there have been so many revolutions, then why did the world have to wait for Kuhn to see them? Because, he said, they are largely invisible. For, after a revolution, the winners rewrite the history of science to make it look as if the present paradigm is the brilliant but rational sequel to previous work. The implication is that only someone of Kuhn’s historical sensitivity could be expected to notice this. (Skeptical critics reply that Kuhn invented the problem for which he had a solution.) Indeed, in his large book on the history of the early quantum theory (Kuhn 1978), he moved the origin of the quantum theory revolution forward five years, from Planck in 1900 to Einstein and Ehrenfest in 1905. Revisionist historiography by whiggish scientists, he claimed, had smoothed out the actual history by crediting Planck with a solution that he actually rejected at the time to a problem that he did not then have—and by diminishing the truly radical contribution of Einstein. Kuhn’s move again raises the question whether the authors of a revolution must knowingly break from the received research tradition. 3.4 Revolution or Evolution? At the end of Structure, Kuhn drew an analogy between the development of science and evolutionary biology. This was surprising, since ‘evolution’ is commonly employed as a contrast term to ‘revolution’. Kuhn’s main point was that evolution ramifies rather than progressing toward a final goal, yet its degree of specialization through speciation can be regarded as a sort of progress, a progress from a historically existing benchmark rather than a progress toward a preordained, speculative goal. So specialization is an indicator of progress. As for revolutions, they correspond to macromutations. The process described in Section XII as the resolution of revolutions is the selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science. The net result of a sequence of such revolutionary selections, separated by periods of normal research, is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge. Successive stages in that developmental process are marked by an increase in articulation and specialization. And the entire process may have occurred, as we now suppose biological evolution did, without benefit of a set goal… . [1970, 172f] At the time, it was striking that Kuhn compared revolutionary transitions, rather than normal scientific developments, with evolutionary change. It seems clear that he did not consider revolution and evolution to be mutually incompatible. But keep in mind that, for him, normal science represents periods of stasis, whereas revolutions are short, highly creative periods that more closely resemble the exploration by random trial and error (p. 87) that we associate with biological evolution. Examined on a minute time scale, however, normal science arguably also involves a (more constrained) variation and selection process, as scientific practitioners search for ways to articulate the paradigm. So, given the inevitability of evolution under such conditions, Kuhn’s treatment of normal science would appear to be too static. The important point here is that, in Kuhn’s view revolution and evolution are compatible when considered on the correct time scales (see Wray 2011 and Kuukkanen 2012). Examined from afar, revolutions are simply the more noteworthy episodes in the evolution of the sciences. Examined up close, they (like discoveries in general for Kuhn) have a detailed structure that is evolutionary, even something as revolutionary as the quantum theory (Kuhn 1978). But how, then, the reader is entitled to ask, can Kuhn accommodate the sharp discontinuities that he advertised in chapter X of the book? We cannot equate revolutions simply with speciation in Darwin’s own sense, given that Darwin’s favorite mechanism of speciation was anagenesis, not cladogenesis—just the long-term gradual evolution within a single line rather than the splitting of lines. Interestingly, the later Kuhn will opt for cladogenesis. As many commentators have pointed out, the theory of punctuated equilibrium of Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould (1992) raises the question of evolution versus revolution, now precisely in the biological (paleontological) context. In fact, Gould and Eldredge were themselves influenced by Kuhn, whom Gould once described as “a dear friend”; but they denied that they had deliberately fashioned themselves as Kuhnian revolutionaries (Gould 1997). Gould and Eldredge end their later review article on punctuated equilibrium by remarking: [C]ontemporary science has massively substituted notions of indeterminacy, historical contingency, chaos and punctuation for previous convictions about gradual, progressive, predictable determinism. These transitions have occurred in field after field; Kuhn’s celebrated notion of scientific revolutions is, for example, a punctuation theory for the history of scientific ideas. [1993, 227] Here, as with Kuhn, those who resist Gould’s attempt to sound so revolutionary as to be contrary to Darwin’s phyletic gradualism note that it is only on a geological timescale that such developments as the Cambrian explosion appear to be episodic. When examined on the timescale of the biological generations of the life forms in question, the development is evolutionary—more rapid evolution than during other periods, to be sure, but still evolutionary. Stuart Kauffman (1993) and Brian Goodwin (1994) defended reorganization in the form of self-organization as the primary macro-biological mechanism, with evolutionary adaptation adding only the finishing touches. Gould and Richard Lewontin had raised this possibility in their famous paper of 1979, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.” Applied to the development of science, this view implies that revolutions determine the overall shape, while ordinary scientific work applies the adaptive microevolution. Meanwhile, Michael Ruse (1989) defended the view that the Darwinian paradigm (with its emphasis on function and adaptation) and the punctuated equilibrium paradigm (with its emphasis on Germanic ideas of form and internal constraints) are complementary. David Hull ended his book, Science as a Process (1988), with the remark that the book can be regarded as an attempt to fulfill both Kuhn’s and Toulmin’s ambitions to provide a evolutionary account of scientific development. Hull’s is the most thoroughgoing attempt to date to provide an evolutionary account of scientific practice, at least in a specific field. However, nothing like Kuhnian paradigms, normal science, and revolutions are to be found in Hull’s book, and this was deliberate on his part. Whereas Kuhn originally said that paradigms correspond one-to-one with scientific communities, Hull rejected Kuhn’s idea of a scientific community as too loose. A scientific community, he said, does not consist of people who merely happen to agree on certain things (anymore than the members of a species are individuals who happen to share a set of traits). Mere consensus is not enough. Rather, communities are tightly causally linked in the right sorts of ways, just as species are. There is no community of biologists or even of evolutionary biologists but only a patchwork of cliques. It is here, locally, that the seeds of innovation are sown, most of which are weeded out in a selective process by the larger group of specialists. Hull’s is a story of the socio-cultural evolution of science without revolution. 4. Kuhn’s Later Account of Scientific Revolutions In “The Road Since Structure,” his 1990 Presidential Address to the Philosophy of Science Association, Kuhn reported on a book in progress, a project that would remain unfinished at his death. (See also Kuhn 1993.) In this and other fragments of that work, he develops the biological metaphor broached at the end of Structure. He retains his old parallel to biological evolution, that science progresses or evolves away from its previous forms rather than toward a final truth about the world; but he now extends the biological analogy by regarding scientific specialties themselves as akin to biological species that carve out research and teaching niches for themselves. In the process, he significantly modifies his conception of scientific revolutions and attendant claims concerning crises and incommensurable breaks. No longer do we hear of revolutions as paradigm change, certainly not in the sense of large paradigms. In fact, Kuhn prefers to speak of “developmental episodes” instead of revolutions. However, he does retain something of his original idea of small paradigms, the concrete problem solutions that he had termed “exemplars” in the “Postscript-1969” to Structure. Most revolutions, he tells us, are not major discontinuities in which a successor theory overturns and replaces its predecessor. Rather, they are like (allopatric) biological speciation, in which a group of organisms becomes reproductively isolated from the main population. [R]evolutions, which produce new divisions between fields in scientific development, are much like episodes of speciation in biological evolution. The biological parallel to revolutionary change is not mutation, as I thought for many years, but speciation. And the problems presented by speciation (e.g., the difficulty in identifying an episode of speciation until some time after it has occurred, and the impossibility even then, of dating the time of its occurrence) are very similar to those presented by revolutionary change and by the emergence and individuation of new scientific specialties. … Though I greet the thought with mixed feelings, I am increasingly persuaded that the limited range of possible partners for fruitful intercourse is the essential precondition for what is known as progress in both biological development and the development of knowledge. When I suggested earlier that incommensurability, properly understood, could reveal the source of the cognitive bite and authority of the sciences, its role as an isolating mechanism was prerequisite to the topic I had principally in mind. … [Kuhn 2000, 98–99] In short, specialization is speciation, a scientific progress heightens communication breakdown. Experts doing similar kinds of research come to realize that their use of key taxonomic terms no longer jibes with mainline usage, in the sense that what Kuhn calls “the no overlap principle” is violated: the group is using a taxonomic hierarchy for crucial kind terms and the associated categories that is incompatible with that of the established tradition. The group splits off and forms a distinct specialty with its own professional journals, conferences, etc., while leaving the rest of the field largely intact. The incommensurability is now a local, community-licensed, taxonomic one that creates something of a barrier to communication with neighboring specialties. One thinks, for example, of the way different biological specialties employ the species concept itself, and the concept of gene. This linguistic sensitivity as a group identifier permits the kind of fullness of communication, both linguistic and practical, within the group that Kuhn had stressed already in Structure and thus permits the group to progress more rapidly. This multiplication of specialties is the key to Kuhn’s new conception of scientific progress. Two recent books that directly engage these issues are Andersen et al. (2006) and Wray (2011), the first from a cognitive science point of view, the second with emphasis on Kuhn’s social epistemology. See also Nersessian (2003, 2008) and Kuukkanen (2012). Another striking fact about Kuhn’s last project is the demotion to “a historical perspective” of the history of science as a detailed source of data or phenomena upon which philosophers of science should draw. While Structure was already a curious mix of an inductive, history-based, bottom-up approach to modeling scientific development and a more formal, top-down approach based on Kuhn’s Kantianism (see below), he now concludes that his core position follows from first principles alone. With much reluctance I have increasingly come to feel that this process of specialization, with its consequent limitation on communication and community, is inescapable, a consequence of first principles. Specialization and the narrowing of the range of expertise now look to me like the necessary price of increasingly powerful cognitive tools. [2000, p. 98] Thus Kuhn’s new emphasis is on synchronic revolutions, in which a field splits into subfields, rather than on the diachronic replacement of one paradigm complex by another that his early account featured. His conception of a science is therefore less monolithic. A vibrant field such as evolutionary biology can tolerate several distinct species concepts at the same time, a fact that contributes rather than detracts from its vibrancy. The overall result is a less tightly integrated, less dogmatic conception of normal science under an overarching paradigm, a view that has implications also for the necessity and size of future revolutions. For no longer need an esoteric discrepancy get the leverage to trigger a crisis that eventuates in the replacement of an entire, tightly integrated system. In this respect, Kuhn’s conception of physics becomes somewhat closer to Godfrey-Smith’s characterization of progress in biology as “a deluge” rather than a full-scale Kuhnian revolution (see below and Godfrey-Smith 2007). Given that progress in biological evolution is better regarded as the remarkable proliferation of intricate, useful design rather than movement toward a goal, the explicit parallels that Kuhn draws to biological evolution suggest that he is moving toward the same conception of scientific progress as some see in biological evolution—as the proliferation of adaptive design. We may know more about his final position once more of the book manuscript, left incomplete at his death, is published. 5. Larger Formations and Historical A Prioris: The Germanic and French Traditions We pass now from the smaller-scale revolutions of Kuhn’s later work to large-scale movements that, in several cases, exceed the bounds of the early Kuhnian paradigms and the revolutionary transformations linking them. Other thinkers have gone even further than Kuhn, by positing the existence of cognitive formations that are both broader and deeper than his. One prominent line of thought here is the neo-Kantian one up through Reichenbach and Carnap, discussed and further developed by Michael Friedman (2001, 2003). Another, not entirely distinct, idea is that of a thought style or discursive formation found variously in such writers as Ludwik Fleck (1935), Alistair Crombie (1994), Michel Foucault (1969), and Ian Hacking (1990, 2002, 2012). Especially in the accounts of Foucault and Hacking, new conceptual spaces are constructed and may “crystallize” (Hacking) rapidly. Once they become canonical, they seem to be such obvious frameworks for making true or false claims that the corresponding categories of thought and action appear to be given as part of the nature of things, as written in the language of nature, so to speak, when they are in fact a product of the cultural conditioning of our socio-cognitive systems. In the limit we project our deeply ingrained cultural categories not only onto our world as we encounter it but also onto all (historically) conceivable worlds. The historical change in question, once called to our attention, seems revolutionary—in a manner that is both broader and deeper than the transition to a new paradigm within a particular scientific specialty. Once again, the magnitude of the change is practically invisible to all but the most sensitive archeologist of knowledge. Feyerabend was alive to this perspective in his work on Galileo. But, unlike his treatment of the Copernican Revolution (Kuhn 1957), Kuhn’s revolutions in Structure and beyond are more limited in scope, typically occurring more or less wholly within a single discipline. Nor is it obvious that the emergence of a new thought style must overturn a distinct predecessor. Of course, we should not regard social constructionist / deconstructionist projects (whether or not deliberately designed) as, automatically, ongoing, enlightened processes that “unfreeze” the stones inherited from the past; for it was these very processes that created essentialist constructions in the first place. The claim is that our constructions today are no different. The four main characteristics of Hacking’s “big revolutions” are that they lead to whole new interdisciplinary complexes, replete with new social institutions and corresponding social changes, and they alter that period’s overall take on, or “feel” for, the universe. For critical discussion of Hacking on styles of reasoning, see Kusch (2010) and Scortino (2016). For more on Hacking, see section 5.3 below. 5.1 Thomas Kuhn: Kantian or Hegelian? Kuhn several times described himself as “a Kantian with moveable categories.” Hoyningen-Huene (1993) provides a broadly Kantian interpretation of Kuhn (endorsed by Kuhn himself), as does Friedman (2001, 2003, 2010). Given the historical approach of Structure, other commentators have likened Kuhn to Hegel instead of Kant. And given the early Kuhn’s view that scientific reason is manifested more clearly in historical change as well as in normal scientific practices than in symbolic logical structures, Kuhn’s early theory of scientific change can be termed very broadly Hegelian. Also fitting the broadly Hegelian frame is Kuhn’s internalist account of normal scientific research as sowing the seeds of its own destruction through unintended innovation, resulting eventually in a kind of dialectical conflict that drives the enterprise forward. However, there is no Hegelian Spirit lurking within Kuhn’s model, nor a permanent logic of science as its replacement as there was for Lakatos (Lakatos 1970; Hoyningen-Hühne 1993; Bird 2008; Worrall 2003, 2008; Nickles 2009). Kuhn disliked being compared to Hegel, whose work he found obscure and characterized by a non-naturalistic philosophy of history, but it is worth commenting further on the partial resemblance. Both Kant and Hegel rejected naïve empiricism, according to which all human knowledge arises, somehow, from the accumulative aggregation of individual sensations or perceptions. Kant argued that we need transcendental structures such as a system of processing rules in order to organize sensory input into something coherent and intelligible, e.g., as physical objects interacting causally in space and time. These were Kant’s forms of intuition (in space and time) and categories (substance, causality, etc.). They represent the human mind’s contribution to knowledge. (In this regard Kant can be regarded as a forerunner of cognitive psychology.) Thus, our experience of the world is shaped to fit a priori forms, and this is where the Kantian version of idealism enters the picture: the world of human experience is not the world of ultimate reality (Kant’s unknowable, noumenal world of things-in-themselves); rather, it is a world shaped by our own cognitive structures. Hegel, one of the founders of the deep conception of historical change broadly characteristic of nineteenth-century German scholarship, proceeded to historicize Kant’s innovation, in effect by historicizing Kant’s categories. They are not inborn, permanent, and universal; on the contrary, they are socio-historically acquired or lost and hence differ from one historical epoch to another. People living in different epochs cognize the world differently. It is tempting to read the Kuhn of Structure as further relativizing and localizing Hegel to specific scientific domains and their paradigms. Kuhn’s model provides endogenous, dynamic mechanisms of (inadvertent) scientific innovations that sow the seeds of the paradigm’s eventual destruction in a vaguely Hegelian sort of dialectical process. It thus becomes possible to experience a change in categorical scheme within one’s own lifetime—the victory of the new paradigm being the small-scale scientific counterpart of Hegel watching Napoleon march in victory through the streets of Jena! Thus it is tempting to regard Kuhnian revolutions as Hegelian revolutions writ small. Nonetheless, in terms of historical genealogy, Kuhn is better aligned with the Kantian tradition, especially the neo-Kantian relativization of Kant. Interestingly, some logical empiricists (especially Reichenbach) were influenced by the neo-Kantianism of the German Marburg School of philosophy to develop a historically relativized but constitutive a priori (see below and Friedman 2001.) 5.2 The German Neo-Kantian Tradition There is a long historical gap between Kant/Hegel and Kuhn, and this space is not empty. Many other thinkers, especially those in the various nineteenth-century idealist traditions, were Kantian or Hegelian or neo-Hegelian or neo-Kantian opponents of empiricist positions that they considered naïve, such as that of John Stuart Mill. The neo-Kantian label applies even to prominent logical positivists of the Vienna Circle and logical empiricists of the Berlin Circle, who have too often been caricatured as simple, cumulative empiricists. As Friedman (2001) and others have shown, several founders of twentieth-century academic philosophy of science extended the neo-Kantian attack on simple empiricism. The basic idea here is that, just as Kant regarded any account of perception and knowledge as naïvely empiricist insofar as it left no room for underlying cognitive organizing principles, so any account of the sciences that provided no analogous underlying social-cognitive framework was a continuation of simple empiricism, i.e., a version of “positivism.” In this particular respect, W. V. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” and Word and Object (Quine 1951, 1960) were throwbacks to simple empiricism in their attempt to eliminate the Kantian formal component. The German Marburg School of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer was especially important in the emergence of modern philosophy of science in the form of the logical positivism and logical empiricism. Friedman (2001 and elsewhere) has explored its influence on young Reichenbach’s attempt to interpret the significance of the new relativity theory. Rudolf Carnap had been influenced by Ernst Cassirer, among others. (See the entries on logical empiricism, Reichenbach, Carnap, Cohen, Natorp, and Cassirer.) Cassirer’s central theme was the fundamental epistemological implications of the replacement of Aristotle’s subject-predicate logic and substance ontology by the new relational logic of the modern, mathematical-functional approach to nature. This could not be a priori in Kant’s original sense, since the emergence of non-Euclidean geometry had shown that there are alternative organizing principles. But the very fact that we still needed organizing structures that are constitutive or definitive of the cognitive enterprise in question meant that Kant was still basically correct. Like Moritz Schlick, the first leader of the Vienna Circle, Reichenbach of the Berlin school parlayed his engagement with relativity theory and non-Euclidean geometries into a conception of the “relativized a priori.” All of this by around 1920, with the younger Carnap’s views developing during the 1920s and ‘30s. In the USA, meanwhile, C. I. Lewis (1929) was defending his “pragmatic a priori.” In his famous paper of 1950, “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” Carnap made his two-tiered view of inquiry quite explicit. Starting from the problem of the existence of abstract entities, Carnap distinguished internal questions, that is, questions that can arise and be answered within a particular logico-linguistic framework, from external questions, that is, meta-level questions about which framework to prefer. External questions cannot be answered in the same, disciplined manner as internal, for choice of framework is ultimately a pragmatic decision based on the expected fertility of using one framework rather than another. Although it is difficult to equate Carnap’s fruitfulness decisions with Kuhn’s revolutionary breaks (Kuhn 1993, 313f), Carnap regarded his vision of science as similar to Kuhn’s, and he liked the manuscript of Structure that Kuhn submitted to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, as George Reisch (1991) has shown. Thus the clash of Kuhn’s work with that of Carnap and the positivist movement has been exaggerated. Although both defended two-tiered conceptions of inquiry, there are important differences between Kuhn and Carnap (as Friedman, 2001, 2003, 2010, among others, observes). For Carnap, as for Reichenbach, the choice of framework or coordinating definitions was conventional, a matter of convenience or heuristic fertility, whereas for committed Kuhnian normal scientists the foundational tenets of their paradigm are deep truths about the world, principles not subject to empirical test. (However, in a crisis situation, fertility becomes a key element in theory and paradigm choice.) In Carnap’s frameworks these were explicit systems of logical rules, whereas Kuhn’s account of normal science largely jettisoned rule-based knowledge in favor of a kind of case-based tacit knowledge, the cases being the concrete exemplars. Third, Kuhn himself emphasized that his approach was historical, whereas Carnap’s was not. Although a Carnapian change from one logical framework to another could, in principle, be quite revolutionary, Carnap himself never emphasized this point, suggested nothing of Kuhn’s radical discontinuity, and was simply not interested in the history of science. Meanwhile, Friedman himself has extensively developed the idea of historically contingent but constitutive a prioris (e.g., 2001, 2003, 2008). He is sympathetic to Kuhn’s view that revolutions occur when the constitutive principles change. From the old point of view, there is disruptive and incommensurability, but defenders of the new viewpoint manages to establish a kind of continuity. Friedman goes well beyond Kuhn in stressing the role of philosophical ideas in establishing this continuity. Since deep conceptual revolutions or paradigm-shifts are a fact of scientific life (and, I would argue, a necessity), we are never in a position to make our present constitutive principles as truly universal principles of human reason–as fixed once and for all throughout the evolution of science. In recent work, Friedman devotes more attention to the social dimension, and he notes that even the standards of rationality may continue to change historically. (See the entry “Historical Theories of Rationality”. See also DiSalle 2002.) Another development that appeals to Germanic themes in its criticism of naive empiricism is the idealization movement of the Poznań School in Poland, associated especially with Leszek Nowak. This group regards science as developing in an idealizational and dialectical manner, ideas that they trace back to Karl Marx’s analysis of economics, inspired by his own study of Galileo’s fruitful use of abstract, idealized models against the Aristotelians. The Poznań group regards idealization as the secret to modern science and finds it remarkable that virtually all previous analytic philosophy of science remains Aristotelian in treating proposed laws and theories not as ideal models but as true or false statements directly about the real world (Nowak 1980 and later writings; see also Krajewsky 1977). As models, these constructions must be concretized to some degree before they can be applied to the real world. While the idealizationists tend to reject Kuhnian revolutions as too discontinuous and irrational, they do see a resemblance to their internalistic, dialectical conception of scientific development. For them a revolution consists in a new theory or model that reveals a previously unnoticed idealizing assumption built into its predecessor, a change that alters scientists’ conception of what is essential versus peripheral to the domain of phenomena in question. Hence there can be a significant change of world-conception. There is some affiliation of Poznań with the European structuralist account of theories, based on a set-theoretical analysis of theory structure and theory relations. Kuhn himself was much attracted to Joseph Sneed’s approach (Sneed 1971), soon extended by Wolfgang Stegmüller (1974/1976) and others. Given the informality of Kuhn’s own approach and his explicit shunning of rules and rational reconstructions, his attraction to the structuralist line was initially puzzling. However, the structuralists were and are interested in intertheory relations, and models are central to their non-sentential conception of theories. These are models in the formal sense, but Kuhn found insightful connections to his own use of models in the form of exemplars. For both Kuhn and the structuralists it is the collection of exemplars or models, not an abstract statement of a theory, that carries the weight in scientific inquiry. Already the early Kuhn, especially in the postscript to the second edition of Structure, largely abandoned the traditional conception of theories as deductive systems, even in physics, and substituted informal collections of models of various, exemplary kinds, along with a toolbox of expert practices for constructing and applying them (Cartwright 1983, Giere 1988, Teller 2008). He always liked Margaret Masterson’s remark that “a paradigm [in the sense of preferred models or exemplars] is what you use when the theory is not there” (Baltas et al. 2000, 300). Such a view, like Nowak’s, anticipates the move from theory-centered to model-centered accounts of scientific work. However, Kuhn’s normal scientific practitioners presumably hold the models to be true in their original application, as is the grand theory incorporated in the paradigm, whereas today the emphasis is on modeling practices across the sciences, in which the models are almost always known in advance to be false because of their employment of idealizations, approximations, abstractions, etc. 5.3 The French Discontinuity Theorists Meanwhile, important French thinkers had already taken a historical approach, one that explicitly characterizes science as a series of breaks or coupures. The principal genealogy includes Léon Brunschvicg, Gaston Bachelard and his student, Georges Canguilhem, and the latter’s student, Michel Foucault. Neither Kuhn’s historicism nor his talk of revolutionary breaks was news to the French (Gutting, 2001, 2003). The French tradition of science studies, going back to Auguste Comte and including later figures such as Pierre Duhem and Henri Poincaré, possessed a historical dimension that positivism lost after Ernst Mach, as it became logical positivism. However, the French and Germanic traditions have some roots in common. As Gutting points out, Brunschvicg, like Émile Meyerson, was a science-oriented idealist. For him the mind is not a passive wax tablet; rather, it actively forges internal links among ideas, yet it is also often surprised by the resistant exteriority of the natural world. Against traditional metaphysics, philosophy of science should limit itself to what the science of the time allows—but not dogmatically so. For dogmatic attempts to extract timeless principles and limitations (such as Kant’s denial of the possibility of non-Euclidean geometry) may soon be embarrassed by further scientific advances. Einstein’s general theory of relativity exemplifies the revolutionary nature of the most impressive developments. Bachelard, French physicist and philosopher-historian of science, also believed that only by studying history of science can we gain an adequate understanding of human reason. He stressed the importance of epistemological breaks or discontinuities (coupures épistémologiques). In Le Nouvel Esprit Scientifique (1934), Bachelard argued that the worldview of classical physics, valuable in its own time, eventually became an obstacle to future progress in physics. Hence a break was needed. Here, then, we already find the idea that a successful theory can lose its luster by being considered exhausted of its resources and thus lacking in fertility. Like Brunschvicg, Bachelard held that a defensible, realist philosophy had to be based on the science of its day. Hence, scientific revolutions have (and ought to have) brought about epistemological revolutions. The reality we posit, he said, ought to be that of the best science but with the realization that our concepts are active constructs of our own minds, not imported from nature’s own language, as it were. Future mental activity as well as future empirical findings are likely to require another rupture. As Gutting points out, Bachelard’s account of discontinuity was not as radical as Kuhn’s. Bachelard was willing to speak of progress toward the truth. He made much of the fact that successor frameworks, such as non-Euclidean geometry or quantum physics, retain key predecessor results as special cases and, in effect, contextualize them. Canguilhem was more interested in the biological and health sciences than Bachelard and gave great attention to the distinction between the normal and the pathological, a distinction that does not arise in physical science. For this and other reasons, in his view, we can expect no reduction of biology to physics. Canguilhem provided a more nuanced conception of obstacles and ruptures, noting, for example, that an approach such as vitalism that constitutes an obstacle in one domain of research can simultaneously play a positive role elsewhere, as in helping biological scientists to resist reductive thinking. Here we find context sensitivities and heuristic resources difficult to capture in terms of a context- and content-neutral logic of science such as the logical empiricists espoused. Bachelard and Canguilhem also had less disruptive conceptions of scientific objectivity and scientific closure than Kuhn. Canguilhem criticized Kuhn’s (alleged) view that rational closure could not amount to more than group consensus. Both Frenchmen emphasized the importance of norms and denied that disciplinary agreement was as weak as Kuhnian consensus. Kuhn replied to this sort of objection (in “Postscript” and elsewhere) that his scientific communities do possess shared values, that their agreement is not something arbitrary, say, as whipped up by political ideologues. Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge (Foucault 1966, 1969) posits a distinction between a superstructure of deliberately made observations, claims, and arguments and a deep structure, most elements of which we are probably unconscious. Once again we meet a two-level account. Writes Hacking: Foucault used the French word connaissance to stand for such items of surface knowledge while savoir meant more than science; it was a frame, postulated by Foucault, within which surface hypotheses got their sense. Savoir is not knowledge in the sense of a bunch of solid propositions. This “depth” knowledge is more like a postulated set of rules that determine what kinds of sentences are going to count as true or false in some domain. The kinds of things to be said about the brain in 1780 are not the kinds of things to be said a quarter-century later. That is not because we have different beliefs about brains, but because “brain” denotes a new kind of object in the later discourse, and occurs in different sorts of sentences. [2002, 77] Given the influence of Foucault, we may also locate our discussion of Hacking’s own work on historical ontology here (Hacking 2002). Hacking (1975, 1990, 1995, 2012) has studied in depth the emergence of probability theory and (later) of statistical thinking and the construction of the modern self as key examples of what he terms “historical ontology.” He acknowledges inspiration from both Foucault’s discursive formations and Crombie’s styles of thinking (Crombie 1994), with a dose of Feyerabend thrown into the mix. Like Kuhn (and Friedman), Hacking returns to Kant’s “how possible?” question, the answer to which sets out the necessary conditions for a logical space of reasons in which practitioners can make true or false claims about objects and pose research questions about them. Hacking, too, historicizes the Kantian conception. He likes the term ‘historical a priori’, which Canguilhem once applied to the work of his erstwhile student, Foucault. The historical a priori points at conditions whose dominion is as inexorable, there and then, as Kant’s synthetic a priori. Yet they are at the same time conditioned and formed in history, and can be uprooted by later, radical, historical transformations. T. S. Kuhn’s paradigms have some of the character of a historical a priori. [Hacking 2002, 5] … [S]cientific styles of thinking & doing are not good because they find out the truth. They have become part of our standards for what it is, to find out the truth. They establish criteria of truthfulness. … Scientific reason, as manifested in Crombie’s six genres of inquiry, has no foundation. The styles are how we reason in the sciences. To say that these styles of thinking & doing are self-authenticating is to say that they are autonomous: they do not answer to some other, higher, or deeper, standard of truth and reason than their own. To repeat: No foundation. The style does not answer to some external canon of truth independent of itself. [2012, 605; Hacking’s emphasis] Hacking describes changes in historical a prioris as “significant singularities during which the coordinates of ‘scientific objectivity’ are rearranged” (2002, 6). Although reminiscent of Kuhn’s positions in some ways, there are striking differences. As noted above, Hacking’s constructed formations are much broader than Kuhn’s. Thus he feels free to employ telling bits of popular culture in laying out his claims, and he admits to being whiggish in starting from the present and working backward to find out how we got here. Moreover, in mature, modern science, unlike Kuhnian paradigms, several of Hacking’s styles of thinking and doing can exist side by side, e.g., the laboratory and hypothetical modeling traditions. Yet people living before and after the historical crystallization of a style would find each other mutually unintelligible. Hacking recognizes that Kuhnian problems of relativism (rather than subjectivism) lurk in such positions. “Just as statistical reasons had no force for the Greeks, so one imagines a people for whom none of our reasons for belief have force” (2002, 163). This sort of incommensurability is closer to Feyerabend’s extreme cases (as in the ancient Greek astronomers versus their Homeric predecessors) than to Kuhn’s “no common measure” (2002, chap. 11). This sort of unintelligibility runs deeper than a Kuhnian translation failure. It is not a question of determining which old style statements match presumed new style truths; rather, it is a question of the conditions for an utterance to make a claim that is either true or false at all. Writes Hacking, Many of the recent but already classical philosophical discussions of such topics as incommensurability, indeterminacy of translation, and conceptual schemes seem to discuss truth where they ought to be considering truth-or-falsehood. [2002, 160] By contrast, Kuhnian paradigms include a set of positive assertions about the world. Yet Kuhn himself was attracted by Hacking’s way of putting the point about truth-and-falsity (Kuhn 2000, p. 99). 5.4 Kuhn’s Relation to the Germanic and French Traditions To what extent was Kuhn indebted to these thinkers? As noted above, he took Kant but not Hegel very seriously. He was largely self-taught in philosophy of science. Among his contemporaries, he was familiar with Popper but not in any detail with the various strains of logical positivism and logical empiricism, in particular the positions of Carnap and Reichenbach. Apparently, he was only slightly acquainted with the work of Bachelard while writing Structure, and they never engaged in a fruitful interchange (Baltas et al. 2000, 284f). Kuhn did acknowledge, in print and in his classes, the crucial influence on his historical and philosophical thinking of the two Russian émigrés, Émile Meyerson, author of Identité et Realité (1908) and Alexandre Koyré, especially his Études Galiléenes (1939), and that of Annaliese Maier, the German historian of medieval and early modern science. He had read Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (originally published in German in 1935) and Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge (1958) and had had some discussion with Polanyi (Baltas et al. 2000, 296). Kuhn was also indebted to Wittgenstein, early (“The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” 1922, 148) and late (on language games and forms of life). (See Sharrock and Read 2002, the introduction to Harris 2005, and Kindi 2010 for Kuhn’s relation to Wittgenstein and others.) He knew something of Toulmin’s work. Kuhn more than anyone in the Anglo-American world pointed out the need for larger-sized units than individual theories in making sense of modern science. Nonetheless, as we have seen, others in the Teutonic and Francophone worlds had previously postulated even larger socio-intellectual units and correspondingly deeper changes than Kuhn’s, on somewhat different scales of intellectual space and time. If we think of authors such as the Annales historian Fernand Braudel, with his distinct time-scales, we recognize that the attribution of transformative change clearly depends heavily on the choice of time-scale and on how fine- or course-grained is our approach. Hacking (2002, 76) makes this point with reference to the French context: There are two extremes in French historiography. The Annales school went in for long-term continuities or slow transitions—“the great silent motionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events” (to quote from the first page of Foucault’s 1969 Archeology of Knowledge). Foucault takes the opposite tack, inherited from Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Louis Althusser. He posits sharp discontinuities in the history of knowledge. Although Kuhn emphasized the importance of skilled scientific practice, his paradigms remained closer to the articulate surface of scientific culture than Foucault’s discursive formations, which are better located in the unconscious than in the Kuhnian subconscious. Foucault does not speak of revolution. 6. Other Revolution Claims and Examples Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1861) remarked that “Revolutions never follow precedents nor furnish them.” Given the unpredictability, the nonlinearity, the seeming uniqueness of revolutions, whether political or scientific, it is therefore surprising to find Thomas Kuhn attempting to provide a General Theory of Scientific Revolutions (Kindi 2005). Early Kuhn did seem to believe that there is a single, underlying pattern to the development of mature sciences that is key to their success, and late Kuhn a different pattern. Has either early or late Kuhn found such a pattern, or has he imposed his own philosophical structure on the vagaries and vicissitudes of history? Kuhn’s Kantianism always did live in tension with his historicism, and in his late work (e.g., 2000c) he surprisingly gave up the pretense of deriving his pattern of taxonomic change and speciation from history of science, on the ground that it largely followed “from first principles.” Numerous philosophers, scientists, and other commentators have made claims about scientific change that differ from Kuhn’s. (For a recent selection see Soler et al. 2008.) Some, as we have seen, are skeptical of revolution talk altogether, others of Kuhn’s in particular. Still others accept that some revolutions are Kuhnian but deny that all of them are. One common criticism is that not all revolutionary advances are preceded by an acute crisis, that is, by major failures of preceding research. Kuhn himself allowed for exceptions already in Structure. Another is that revolutionary changes need not involve discontinuities in all of Kuhn’s levels at once (especially Laudan 1984). Yet another is that there need be little logical or linguistic discontinuity. A rapid, seemingly transformative change in research practices may involve simply a marked gain in data accessibility or accuracy or computational processing ability via new instrumentation or experimental design. And on the later Kuhn’s own view, revolution need not be a game of creative destruction. Only a few examples can be considered here. 6.1 Some Alternative Conceptions of Scientific Revolution Do revolutions consist, according to Kuhn, of major new materials (experimental facts, theories, models, instruments, techniques) entering a scientific domain or, instead, of a major restructuring or rearrangement of materials, practices, and community affiliations already present? Kuhn states that the relativity revolution might serve as a prototype for revolutionary reorientation in the sciences. Just because it did not involve the introduction of additional objects or concepts, the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics illustrates with particular clarity the scientific revolution as a displacement of the conceptual network through which scientists view the world. [1970, 102] The reader may find this claim confusing, however, because in the just-preceding paragraphs Kuhn had emphasized the ontological and conceptual changes of precisely this revolution, e.g., the radical change in the concept of mass. Einstein’s masses are not Newtonian masses, he insisted. They are newly introduced entities; hence, we may infer, new content. Yet Kuhn surely does have a point worth saving, in that relativity theory still deals with most of the same kinds of phenomena and problems as classical mechanics and employs immediate successors to the classical concepts. But, if so, then reorganization of familiar materials implies a disciplinary continuity through revolution that Kuhn minimized. That reorganization dominates Kuhn’s conception of revolutions is apparent throughout his work. As a young scholar he had an epiphany when Aristotle’s seemingly radically false or unintelligible claims suddenly came together for him as a coherent, comprehensive worldview. This experience became Kuhn’s psychological model for revolutionary transformation from one paradigm to its successor and informed his later talk of Gestalt switches. But he also emphasized that revolution involves social reorganization of the field (not merely the cognitive reorganization of an individual), from one form of scientific life to another, incompatible with it. By implication, his structural or formal conception of revolution excluded the alternative idea of revolution as extraordinary bursts in substantive content. In Conceptual Revolutions, Paul Thagard (1992) retains something of Kuhn’s idea of conceptual transformation and the more specific idea of taxonomic transformation. He distinguishes two kinds of reclassification, in terms of the language of tree structures used in computer science: branch jumping and tree switching. Branch jumping reclassifies or relocates something to another branch of the same tree, e.g., reclassifying the whale as a mammal rather than a fish, the earth as a planet, or Brownian motion as a physical rather than a biological phenomenon. New branches can appear and old branches can be eliminated. Meanwhile, tree switching replaces an entire classification tree by a different tree structure based on different principles of classification, as when Darwin replaced the static classification tree of Linnaeus by one based on evolutionary genealogy and when Mendeleev replaced alternative classification systems of the chemical elements by his own table. Taking a computational approach to philosophy of science, Thagard employs his computer program ECHO to reconstruct and evaluate several historical cases of alleged conceptual revolution and arrives at a tamer conception of revolutionary breaks than Kuhn’s. The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen (2006) also devotes a good deal of attention to cognition and categorization issues, in a defense of the later Kuhn’s approach. The work of cognitive psychologist Lawrence Barsalou and of philosopher-historian Nancy Nersessian (the founder of the “cognitive historical” approach to science) plays a significant role in their account. Nersessian herself (2003, 2008) emphasizes model-based reasoning. These are no longer static cases or exemplars, for they possess an internal dynamic. Howard Margolis (1993) distinguishes two kinds of revolutions, depending on which kinds of problems they solve. Those revolutions that bridge gaps, he contends, differ from those that surmount or penetrate or somehow evade barriers. His focus is on barriers, a neglected topic even though it fits Kuhn’s account of cognition well. Margolis develops Kuhnian themes in terms of deeply ingrained “habits of mind.” While such habits are necessary for efficient scientific work within any specialty discipline, they constitute barriers to alternative conceptions. More broadly, deeply ingrained cultural habits of mind can close off opportunities that, according to the perspective of later generations, were staring them in the face. Margolis is struck by the apparent fact that all the materials for Copernicus’ new model of the solar system had been available, in scattered form, for centuries. No new gap-crossing developments were needed. He concludes that, rather than a gap to be bridged, the problem was a cognitive barrier that needed to be removed, a barrier that blocked expert mathematical astronomers from bringing together, as mutually relevant, what turned out to be the crucial premises, and then linking them in the tight way that Copernicus did. If Margolis’ account of the Copernican Revolution is correct, it provides an example of revolution as holistic reorganization of available materials, hence the non-piecemeal, noncumulative nature of revolutions. The developments that lead to a barrier’s removal can be minor and, as in the case of Copernicus, even quite peripheral to the primary subject matter that they ultimately help to transform. Here one thinks of a model popular with mystery writers, where an everyday observation leads to a sudden change in perspective. Davis Baird (2004) contends that there can be revolutions in practice that are not conceptual revolutions. He emphasizes the knowledge embodied in skills and in instruments themselves. His central example is analytic chemistry. There is little doubt that analytical chemistry has undergone a radical change. The practice of the analyst, who now deals with large, expensive equipment, is different than it was in 1930. Modern instrumental methods are by and large more sensitive and accurate, have lower limits of detection, and require smaller samples; different kinds of analyses can be performed. Analytical chemistry is much less a science of chemical separations and much more a science of determining and deploying the physical properties of substances. … The revolutionary phase of Thomas S. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions starts with a crisis, a problem that the established methods of normal science cannot solve (Kuhn [1962] 1970; 1996, ch. 5). There was no such crisis in analytical chemistry. While one might imagine that analytical chemistry underwent a change of paradigm, there was no crisis that provoked this change. Pre-1930 analytical chemists did not bemoan the inability of their chemistry to solve certain problems. Instead, new methods were developed that could solve established “solved” problems, but solve them better: more efficiently, with smaller samples, greater sensitivity, and lower limits of detection. These changes in analytical chemistry do not suffer from any kind of incommensurability: today, one can easily enough understand what analytical chemists were doing in 1900–although the idea that the analytical chemist is one who can quantitatively manufacture pure chemicals is startling on first encounter. … The transformation in analytical chemistry passes all of Cohen’s tests. Recently, Rogier De Langhe (2012, 2014a and b, 2017) has been developing a broadly Kuhnian, two-process account of science from an economics standpoint. Instead of doing a series of historical cases, De Langhe and colleagues are developing algorithms to detect subtle patterns in the large citation databases now available. De Langhe employs economic arguments to illuminate such themes as the division of cognitive labor, models of scientific progress, and scientists’ decisions about whether to specialize or to innovate. 6.2 Some Biological Cases The account of the dynamics of science in Structure ill fit the rapid splitting and recombining of fields in the post-World War II era of Big
7992	dbpedia	0	65	https://www.coursehero.com/tutors-problems/Philosophy/43103720-Thomas-Kuhn-what-are-4-events-of-Thomas-Kuhn-each-event-must-list/	en				[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null
7992	dbpedia	3	30	https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/did-thomas-kuhn-kill-truth	en	Did Thomas Kuhn Kill Truth? — The New Atlantis	https://www.thenewatlant…ordahlbanner.jpg	https://www.thenewatlant…ordahlbanner.jpg	[ "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/themes/thenewatlantis/assets/about.png", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/themes/thenewatlantis/assets/arrow-right.svg", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/themes/thenewatlantis/assets/arrow-right.svg", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/themes/thenewatlantis/assets/arrow-right.svg", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/themes/thenewatlantis/assets/arrow-right.svg", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/uploads/legacy/20180914_TNA55Kordahlbanner.jpg", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/uploads/legacy/20180914_TNA55KordahlTheAshtray.jpg", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/?attachment_id=20729", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/who-is-the-new-atlantis-for/attachment/issue-page-gettyimages-544240978-594x594", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/themes/thenewatlantis/assets/logo-footer.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2018-09-14T04:00:00+00:00	A debate on the nature of truth turns into a squabble over whether Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at Errol Morris’s head.	en	https://www.thenewatlant…hite-1-32x32.jpg	The New Atlantis	https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/did-thomas-kuhn-kill-truth	In 2011, the filmmaker and writer Errol Morris published a series of five articles that may rank as the oddest production of his long and varied career. The first began like this: It was April, 1972. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. The home in the 1950s of Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. Thomas Kuhn, the author of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and the father of the paradigm shift, threw an ashtray at my head. Taken by itself, this sort of flamboyant anecdote seems like pure Morris, consonant with the other series he has published with the New York Times as part of their Opinionator section — series that have explored, among other things, the hagiography of Abraham Lincoln, the perceived credibility of various typefaces, and the contrasts between photographic evidence and photographic art. As the documentarian behind such films as Gates of Heaven (the one about the pet cemetery), The Thin Blue Line (the one that introduced re-enactment into true-crime docs), and The Fog of War (the one with Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara), Morris has been given a wide berth to explore his interests in public. But the articles about Thomas Kuhn, collectively titled “The Ashtray,” and now reworked into the book The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality), seemed rawer than usual. Morris now seemed not fascinated or amused — his usual registers — but angry. It was as though, after nearly forty years since his run-in with Kuhn at Princeton, the time had come for revenge. But if this was revenge, it was revenge of a strange sort, taking the form of extended diatribes against postmodernism, the historiography of science, and Kuhn’s classic work on scientific revolutions. Revenge, of course, is sweet. But it can also be hard to get. “The Ashtray” centers on Morris’s brief stint as a graduate student — he lasted a year — in what was then Princeton’s Program in the History and Philosophy of Science. The program was “sort of a consolation prize,” in his defensive version, for being rejected from Harvard’s history of science program. During this time, Morris had the bad fortune to fall in with the physicist, philosopher, and historian Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996). Kuhn’s fame rested on his widely influential 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he argued that the history of science was punctuated by occasional “paradigm shifts.” Kuhn held that scientific theories from before and after a scientific revolution cannot be compared in a straightforward way; they are “incommensurable,” because the meanings of familiar terms change in unexpected ways as scientists go from one mode of description to another. One drastic consequence of incommensurability is that there isn’t any such thing as absolute progress from one paradigm to the next — say from before the Copernican Revolution to after, or from classical physics to quantum physics. A new paradigm may be more complete, or simpler, or more useful for answering certain questions compared to the preceding one, but it is not, strictly speaking and on the whole, objectively better. Kuhn’s skepticism, in Morris’s view, is poisonous, leading to a cultural devaluation of objective truth. Tellingly, Morris only glancingly notices Kuhn the historian, whose The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957) and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912 (1978) are both carefully documented, in apparent contradiction to the recklessness Morris alleges. A certain theatricality is at play in Morris’s articles on Kuhn — the first article is accompanied by a few seconds of video, an ashtray and cigarettes spewing across a black background — and Kuhn emerges mainly as a personality, not a thinker. Morris’s Kuhn is an imposing man, a tall bully, an “incredible chain-smoker. First Pall Malls and then True Blues…. Alternating. One cigarette lighting another.” He barks at students for “Whiggishness” whenever they incorporate knowledge of the present into talk of the past. When Morris mentions he is interested in hearing the philosopher Saul Kripke, Kuhn commands, “Under no circumstances are you to go to those lectures. Do you hear me?” In a story recounted in the first article, Morris turns in a thirty-page paper, double-spaced. Kuhn returns a thirty-page response, single-spaced: “No margins. He was angry, really angry.” Morris goes in to confront Kuhn and charges into an argument. If paradigms are incommensurable, young Morris asks, how is the history of science possible? “He’s trying to kill me,” mutters Kuhn, head in hands. When Morris suggests that maybe it’s still possible “for someone who imagines himself to be God,” Kuhn throws an ashtray at him. Soon thereafter, Kuhn has Morris kicked out of Princeton. Errol Morris projects have long featured monomaniacal obsessives, in ways that are both positive (Stephen Hawking’s retreat into physics in the 1991 documentary A Brief History of Time) and negative (Fred A. Leuchter’s electric-chair designs and Holocaust denial in the 1999 Mr. Death). At one point in Wormwood, Morris’s 2017 Netflix miniseries about Eric Olson’s investigation of his father’s death in 1953, Olson clarifies that when he first asked himself whether the CIA had murdered his father, he didn’t know that the question would take up the next forty years of his life. For “The Ashtray,” Morris casts himself in a similar role. For monomaniacs, it should be noted, narrow focus can turn open fields into blind alleys. In one of the “Ashtray” articles, Morris comes across an interview where Kuhn explains that his discussions of incommensurable paradigms were inspired by the mathematical notion of incommensurability. We can see a simple example of this notion in the relationship between the sides and the diagonal of a square. If the side of a square is exactly 1 foot long, then its diagonal measures √2 feet, a value that can’t be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers. When the Greeks discovered this, they reasoned in terms of the lengths of line segments, so incommensurability for them meant that the diagonal couldn’t be defined as a ratio of multiples of the side of the square. Kuhn borrowed this as a metaphor for how paradigms before and after a scientific revolution might use the same words to describe their theories, while labeling different worlds. Not satisfied by this vague correspondence, Morris asks for a more precise account of what mathematical and Kuhnian incommensurability have to do with each other. In search of an answer, he dives deep into the history of Greek math, vividly recounting his quest after an ancient book on Pythagoras — down an elevator, through a tunnel, into the mysterious lower floors … of the Widener library at Harvard. He even provides the book’s call number. Morris wants to find out whether the legend might be true that Pythagoreans murdered Hippasus, the philosopher said to have first uncovered the secret of incommensurability, upending a central plank of Pythagorean mathematics and metaphysics. Morris admits that Kuhn never even mentions the legend. But maybe the metaphor is that Hippasus’ upending of conventional math is like a paradigm shift that the guardians of the old paradigm tried to prevent by killing him? The story itself is likely false, Morris concludes — and so, ironically, Kuhn’s idea is based on “a Whiggish interpretation of an apocryphal story.” Which is an okay punchline, but has almost nothing to do with Kuhn. Morris gets lost again when he exegetes a passage where Kuhn complains, after reading his critics, that he is tempted to posit the existence of two Kuhns. The quote suggests that Kuhn felt his critics disagreed not with his actual views but with distortions of his views — with the views of a fictional Kuhn. It’s an unremarkable expression of frustration, but Morris calls it “particularly bizarre” and holds that it “suggests that there may be no coherent reading of Kuhn’s philosophy.” The slander piles up. Kuhn is compared to Jorge Luis Borges’s character Pierre Menard and to Humpty Dumpty — both given as examples of the madness of relativism — and to the jailer in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, who alone escapes this relativism because he can see all the jail cells (read: paradigms). An anecdote about Kuhn becoming agitated over how people had been convinced by Hitler is used to imply that Kuhnians, those truth-deniers, are easy marks for Nazis. By the last entry in “The Ashtray,” Morris seems convinced that we, like him, will detest anything stinking of Kuhn. “You won’t be able to understand it,” he prefaces one long Kuhn quote. “Just take my word for it.” Morris closes his series by reminding us that if we were about to die on the electric chair, knowing we were unfairly convicted, we wouldn’t entertain any postmodern doubts about absolute truth, now, would we? Hmm? “The Ashtray” was published online. This had the benefit — pixels are cheap — of allowing many idiosyncratic pictures to accompany the text, from photos of ashtrays and cigarettes to paintings of the Pythagoreans by Raphael and Rubens. It also had the decidedly mixed blessing of reader comments, which might lead anyone into postmodern doubt. Scrolling through the responses, I noticed the comments falling into the usual slots of cynical praise (“One of the finest descriptions of graduate school ever”), unhelpful snark (“Unclear here just what the point is”), and bilious grandstanding (“I’ll try to make this as concise as I possibly can”; please do). But then came something interesting, a signed response from Sarah Kuhn, daughter of Thomas (she confirmed to me by email that she really wrote it): Steer clear of fact checkers, Mr. Morris. The ashtray video is a work of art, as is your essay. Since you take the trouble to mention the Pall Malls, which he never smoked (it was Camels), I wonder about the accuracy of the throwing episode. In all my years with him, I knew my father to be vehement but never violent. Responding to a later article, Thomas Kuhn’s son Nat also demurred: There is apparently yet another Thomas Kuhn here, one I don’t think he would have ever anticipated: the Thomas Kuhn who threw the ashtray. Speaking as his son I have to say that, try as I might, I just can’t get myself to believe that he threw that ashtray. Could it be? Could Errol Morris, that vigorous defender of truth, be lying? Appearing on an April 2017 episode of the philosophy podcast Hi-Phi Nation, Morris was as unhesitant as ever about Kuhn’s toxic influence on our culture’s sense of truth. Generously, he grants that “in my angrier moments, I see him as not entirely responsible for the debasement of science and the debasement of truth.” Yet “I see a line from Kuhn to Karl Rove and Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump.” (This excerpt was quoted by John Horgan at his blog for Scientific American, which prompted Morris to offer a clarification: “If Kuhn had never lived, in that possible world where Kuhn was never born, there might still be a President Donald Trump.”) Asked to summarize what he makes of Kuhn now, Morris simply says, “A**hole.” But in that same podcast, the other Kuhn also appears. Another guest on the episode is James Challey, a student of Kuhn at the same time as Morris, who remembers Kuhn as “very personable,” but also very insistent. Asked whether Kuhn could have thrown the ashtray, Challey hesitates. “I could — imagine that happening? The provocation would have had to’ve been pretty strong.” I would like to suggest that this proliferation of Kuhns — the violent Kuhn, the vehement but personable Kuhn, Kuhn the careful historian, Kuhn the reckless philosopher — is no fluke. Even if no one is lying about any of these seemingly conflicting images, and even if all parties observed the same person, they might wrap those observations in such different words that they end up disagreeing. This happens all the time. Indeed, allowing that it happens also in science gets us a long way toward understanding Kuhn. The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality) is now being published as a book, and it is both significantly less odd and significantly better defended than the articles that spawned it. In the preface, Morris now asks about the ashtray, “Was it thrown at my head? I’m not sure, but I remember it was thrown in my direction.” Kuhn’s Pall Malls have now become Camels. For the most part, Morris still battles a straw-man Kuhn. But much of the new stuff here is fascinating, nestled, as it is, among copious illustrations, between thick margins containing extensive footnotes. Whatever my complaints, The Ashtray is a lot of fun to read. Alongside the anti-Kuhn spleen, a positive argument is hinted at throughout these pages. The argument follows that of the American philosopher Saul Kripke, whose work in logic and philosophy of language — particularly his landmark Naming and Necessity (1980) — Morris posits as an antidote to Kuhn’s poisonous Structure. By Morris’s admission, it is unusual to bring Kripke to a Kuhn fight. After all, the interests of Kuhn (the social structure of science) and of Kripke (how names work in modal logic) don’t have a lot of obvious overlap. To understand Morris’s alleged connection, we should pause to revisit in a bit more detail the basic message of Thomas Kuhn. What exactly is Morris fighting? As many others have noted, Kuhn’s claims about science, history, and knowledge are all snarled. In places, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions reads more like a meta-myth than like straight history. Even converts might admit that its elements could fall apart in isolation. In Structure, Kuhn holds that science changes via two different modes: “normal science,” in which scientists solve puzzles within a given paradigm, and “revolutionary science,” in which scientists, compelled by unexplained anomalies, adopt a new paradigm that can explain them. These paradigm shifts are not fully rational. That is, according to Kuhn, the reason early adopters sign on to a new paradigm is not that it offers greater truth in any straightforward sense. For instance, early quantum theory was an ad hoc kludge. When Max Planck suggested that light from hot objects was emitted in discrete packets (multiples of a constant rather than values along a continuous spectrum), it wasn’t for any revolutionary purpose, but simply because he found that doing so could help him to fit experimental data. The reigning paradigm, mature classical electromagnetism, had been very successful, and there was little reason to doubt that it could explain the data in terms, say, of the microscopic constituents of ordinary solids. Early quantum adopters needed to be either ignorant or visionary (most were both) to suppose that such an explanation was not possible, and to suppose instead that the data suggested fundamentally new laws of nature. But once a new paradigm has matured, its ways of looking at problems and methods of solving them become so pervasive among scientists that the successes of prior paradigms are forgotten. Today, educated by quantum theorists and having read textbooks on quantum theory, few scientists are eager to revisit thermal emission in classical electrodynamic terms. “Normal” scientists — those working firmly within an established paradigm — press on using paradigmatic methods, making incremental improvements within an essentially stable conceptual frame. In all of this, Kuhn can be maddeningly imprecise. Indeed, Kuhn himself admits as much, writing in his postscript to the second edition of Structure that some parts of his “initial formulation” produced “gratuitous difficulties and misunderstandings.” Famously, he proliferates examples of paradigmatic markers — usually textbooks, such as Aristotle’s Physics or Newton’s Opticks — without ever clearly defining what exactly a paradigm is. But wobbles like these are not what bother Errol Morris. What gets under his skin is Kuhn’s strange insistence that changes in scientific paradigms change not only the way scientists investigate the world, but the very world itself. As Kuhn puts it, “In so far as their only recourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world.” Morris takes this as a wholesale rejection of the real world, replacing the sturdy truth with a meaningless mess of mere paradigms that never really get at the world itself, trading the world for words. Which, at last, is where Kripke comes in. According to Morris, what’s “at the heart of Kripke’s work” is that “language is not just about us and our thoughts; it directly — unmediated by our opinions and beliefs — connects us with the world.” Language as an unmediated connection to the world? This sounds a little hard to understand. And it is, a little. In Naming and Necessity, Kripke discusses how proper names function in modal logic. If that sounds dry — well, again, it is, a little. But the parts of Kripke that Morris uses for his argument require some jargon, and we now step tenderly into the weeds. Philosophers since Kant have widely used the categories of a priori and a posteriori to discuss claims about knowledge. Roughly, a priori claims are ones that can be evaluated as true or false based on logic alone, without going out into the world and gathering evidence. For instance, “3 + 5 = 8” is true a priori. By contrast, a posteriori claims need evidence. “Our solar system has eight planets” is true a posteriori (stop, no crying for Pluto), as astronomers had to gather lots of observations to figure that out. While a priori and a posteriori concern how we gain knowledge of things, the categories of necessary and contingent — much used by Kripke — describe the nature of things in themselves. Kripke explains the difference between necessary and contingent by introducing another concept, that of possible worlds. Necessary truths are true in all possible worlds, while contingent truths are true only in some possible worlds. Possible worlds refer to the different ways the universe could be while remaining the same in certain metaphysically essential ways. Think of the worlds proposed by alternative history novels, or by thought experiments asking you to consider a world in which your parents never met. The same two examples work to illustrate the difference: In any of these worlds, we should expect the claim “3 + 5 = 8” to be true. We could therefore label this claim necessarily true. By contrast, a claim like “Our solar system has eight planets” (Pluto, come back!) is only contingently true, because we can easily imagine a universe only slightly different from our own in which the initial conditions of the solar system created a different number of planets. From these examples, one might suppose that necessary is just a synonym for a priori, and contingent a synonym for a posteriori. But Kripke takes pains to argue that this isn’t right, and he gives specific counterexamples. He has us consider the length of one meter, which was defined for well over a century as the length of a specific metal bar in France. When this definition was widely accepted, the claim “The Mètres des Archives is one meter long” was a contingent a priori truth: It was a definition (hence the bar was a meter long a priori), but we could easily imagine a different bar doing the job (hence its truth was contingent). Kripke then gives examples of the converse, the necessary a posteriori truth. To explain, he introduces an idea about how words refer to the world, and how they retain that reference over time. He says that when we first name a specific thing in the world, this “initial baptism” rigidly fixes the name’s reference in all possible worlds. Richard Nixon, for instance, is necessarily Richard Nixon always and everywhere, but he is only contingently the thirty-seventh president of the United States. It is conceivable that he might not have become president, but he could not have been anybody else but Richard Nixon. So the name is fixed, a permanent reference from the words to the particular person. (The fact that he could have been called something else is irrelevant; all that matters is that we know him as Richard Nixon.) Philosophers describe this as Kripke’s “causal theory of reference,” and Morris is mainly interested in how it applies to science. Kripke applied it to the famous case of Phosphorus, the morning star, and Hesperus, the evening star. Scientists learned through observation — that is, they learned a posteriori — that both are the same object: the planet Venus. Since, like Nixon, Venus is necessarily identical to itself (Venus can’t be anything other than Venus), the statement “Phosphorous is Hesperus” is a necessary a posteriori truth. Kripke suggests that establishing such truths might be the job of science more generally. Perhaps, to use another example from Kripke, gold is necessarily made up of atoms with 79 protons, because that’s what makes gold gold — regardless of what we initially thought about the substance or what we have learned about it since. And … so what? Wasn’t this supposed to have something to do with Thomas Kuhn? Morris gets irritated by the suggestion that the connection is anything less than obvious: Years ago I was challenged by a graduate student in the history of science: What do Kripke’s theories have to do with Kuhn’s? The question seemed naïve, even silly. Of course, they are related. They both focus on the relation between language and the world. Kripke establishes something that undermines the entire basis of Kuhn’s work — the necessary a posteriori. It may well be the ultimate goal of scientific inquiry. In the account of Morris’s Kripke, words pick out elements of the world, and as our views evolve, these terms are passed on and progressively refined. For a substance like gold, these investigations help us to figure out what the thing we labeled “gold” was all along. Anyway, contra Kuhn, we don’t have to worry about incommensurability in our vocabularies — since we’re talking about the real world, our underlying references are fixed! I’ve called the holder of this view “Morris’s Kripke” because Saul Kripke himself, as an interview subject late in the book, seems reluctant to co-sign for any claims as certain as those Morris ascribes to him. (Of a separate argument, Kripke comments, “Someone has written a whole book defending the view I portray as not only coherent but as the truth. I don’t know whether I agree with him completely” and “I’m not saying that this is the truth, but I’m arguing like a lawyer for my position.”) Such interpersonal dissonance keeps The Ashtray from being merely dogmatic. Morris seeks out luminaries to bolster his claims — but often they don’t. These interviews are worth reading. We find out Hilary Putnam’s views on translation and Steven Weinberg’s views on scientific histories. Kripke weighs in on Wittgenstein, and Noam Chomsky argues for the ambiguity of how words refer to the world in ordinary, non-scientific language. Morris tries to coax Ross MacPhee, a biologist studying an extinct species, to outline how the species’ essential properties can be defined retrospectively — yes, yes, the necessary a posteriori. Like most good conversations, these yield more questions than answers. Still, I can imagine closing The Ashtray feeling totally convinced. This would take place, I suppose, in the possible world where I’m an Errol Morris fan who hasn’t read any Kuhn. But in this world, I’m an Errol Morris fan who has also read some Kuhn. Morris might contend that I’ve been poisoned. In any case, I admit it: I have doubts. The preface to The Essential Tension (1977) — Thomas Kuhn’s first essay collection published post-Structure — offers advice for students working to interpret primary sources in science. “When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them.” Kuhn continues, “When those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.” Whatever your views on Kuhn, this seems like good advice. It’s also the exact opposite of Errol Morris’s approach to Kuhn in The Ashtray. Of course, if Morris directly experienced Kuhn as a violent maniac, this is understandable; few of us are eager to consider our abusers as important thinkers. On the other hand, with over a half-century of continued appeal, Kuhn must offer something beyond dogmatism and a halo of ash. So what, in his anger, has Morris left out? Let’s start with how well Kuhn was able to capture the way science is actually done. Unlike Kripke, Kuhn was one of us, a Ph.D. physicist whose firsthand knowledge of “normal science” allowed him to document scientific investigations in sensitive detail. To fellow scientists, many of Kuhn’s claims seem less perverse than they are self-evident. When Kuhn discusses how paradigms define the way scientists approach the world, most of us will nod along, remembering the difficult years spent in reproducing classic experiments and solutions. The description of normal science as puzzle-solving within a paradigm certainly resonates with those of us actively searching for problems to tackle. By contrast, you’d be hard pressed to find a single working scientist who is out to discover necessary a posteriori truths. Nevertheless, I suspect that beyond the fetching jargon and neat anecdotes, most scientists would in fact disagree with Kuhn’s more radical claims. For instance, many physicists will agree that the world really is a certain way — that, to the best of our knowledge, everything really is made of relativistic quantum fields. For such physicists, Einstein superseded Newton not for any sociological reason, but because he got closer to the truth. Kuhn, however, was adamant that conflicting paradigms couldn’t be compared so directly. To him, Einstein and Newton described genuinely different worlds, not simply better and worse renditions of the same one we all inhabit. The clearest articulation of Kuhn’s final position can be found in The Road Since Structure (2000), a posthumous miscellany. While the presentation rehashes many of Kuhn’s trademark concepts, it also acknowledges and addresses many of the usual concerns. Discussing incommensurability, Kuhn allows that we can always adopt the lexicon of a competing paradigm (listen up, Mr. Morris: this is how histories are written!), but he still maintains that we can only speak a single language at once, and hence still can’t exactly translate old into new terms. In the title essay — a sketch for a future, never-completed book — Kuhn calls his final view “a sort of post-Darwinian Kantianism.” Kuhn’s theory had always been recognized as “post-Darwinian” in the sense that he argued that the development of science, like biological evolution, is “driven from behind, not pulled from ahead.” Scientific theories are accepted because of how well they solve the problems facing scientific communities at particular historical moments, rather than how well they correspond to the absolute truth about the world. As he was working on his final book, Kuhn realized another sense in which biological evolution could provide a model for the development of science. The diversification of living things into different species, each with a specialized environmental niche, has an analogue in the diversification of science into narrowly specialized fields. And much as organisms from different species are unable to interbreed, the specialized lexicons of different scientific fields make it ever more challenging for different scientific specialists to understand one another. The Kantian aspect of Kuhn’s view has to do with Kant’s notion that our experiences are inevitably filtered through certain categories of understanding, such as the concept of cause and effect. In Kuhn’s words: “Like the Kantian categories, the lexicon” — the way scientists talk about the world within a given paradigm — “supplies preconditions of possible experience.” In other words, the concepts we project on the world inextricably shape how we experience it, and scientists’ paradigmatic lexicon shapes how they see the world. Kuhn is sometimes described as a relativist, full stop; but this isn’t quite right. Kuhn admits there’s something objectively out there. But he qualifies that this thing-in-itself (as Kant put it) is “ineffable, undescribable, undiscussable.” So what can we do? Mostly, we talk, casting our nets over the dark sea. Once we settle on a stable way of talking, we can evaluate claims as objectively true or false. When a seemingly more useful way of talking arises, that’s a scientific revolution. In this new way of talking we can once again evaluate claims as objectively true or false, even if, using the same words as before, claims that were true in the old way of talking might be false in the new way, and vice versa. The issue here is not the denial of reality, but the denial of an absolutely preferred way of talking about it. Statements can be true or false, but not whole languages. As Kuhn puts it, “The ways of being-in-the-world which a lexicon provides are not candidates for true/false.” This is a “coherence theory” of truth, where truth applies not to the world but to statements about the world — and even then only in a given language, only with a given use. This idea is perhaps disturbing, but it doesn’t amount to what critics like Morris think. Morris charges Kuhn with claiming that the world is however we want it to be, but Kuhn in fact claims the opposite. In Kuhn’s view, reality is out there, but it doesn’t speak our language. It remains forever alien, non-linguistic, regardless of how well we seem to describe its various parts. Now, I concede that a lot of this is controversial, and that disagreement with Kuhn can be perfectly reasonable. But there’s a boundary between disagreement and purposeful misrepresentation, and Errol Morris often stomps clear across this line. On page four of The Ashtray, Morris states, “Coherence theories of truth are of little interest to me.” He demonstrates this conclusively by failing to explore them for the remaining 180 pages. Instead, Morris imagines Kuhn as the villain in various scenarios — telling children that the Earth could just as well be flat or round, or telling a condemned man that his guilt or innocence is all about the paradigm. Morris barely mentions, and even then only dismissively, that Kuhn addressed Kripke’s ideas in writing. (The short version of Kuhn’s response is that, although causal theories of reference work reasonably well for some tidy examples like gold, they don’t work for terms whose uses have drastically changed over time, like heat or water.) And never, it seems, has Morris seriously asked himself: What did Kuhn really think? Near the end of the book, Morris summarizes his view of Kuhn: For me, Kuhn’s ultimate crime is not the espousal of nonsense. We’re probably, in varying degrees, all guilty of that. No, to me, there is a worse crime. The history of his endless textual revisions and supposed clarifications is a history, among other things, of moral and intellectual equivocation. Several commentators have argued that Kuhn was aware of my criticisms long before I made them. To me, that exacerbates the situation; it does not mitigate it. When I first read this passage, it seemed not to make sense. To me, these “endless textual revisions and supposed clarifications” sounded suspiciously like thinking. And if Kuhn was aware of Morris’s criticisms, shouldn’t Morris be interested in that? Shouldn’t Morris, that bloodthirsty truth-hound, be curious whether Kuhn’s responses had force? Following Kuhn’s advice to pay special attention to seemingly absurd passages and to ask why a sensible person would write them, I reread it. And Kuhn was right — the meaning changed. Suddenly all the stuff about truth seemed sort of moot, and I realized that Morris, the spurned grad student, had gotten his revenge. But against whom? Readers who arrive initially unconcerned may find that Morris has won his fight fair and square, and that Kuhn, that violent obfuscator, has finally gotten the drubbing he deserves. But those of us who look again may notice that Morris has been punching the wrong Kuhn, while the real one sits outside the ring, untouched. Like his imaginary Kuhn, Morris wins the fight for truth only by getting the last word.
7992	dbpedia	2	1	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn	en	Thomas Kuhn	https://upload.wikimedia…/Thomas_Kuhn.jpg	https://upload.wikimedia…/Thomas_Kuhn.jpg	[ "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/icons/wikipedia.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-wordmark-en.svg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-tagline-en.svg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/87/Thomas_Kuhn.jpg/220px-Thomas_Kuhn.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Wikiquote-logo.svg/34px-Wikiquote-logo.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/Commons-logo.svg/30px-Commons-logo.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/96/Symbol_category_class.svg/16px-Symbol_category_class.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e0/Symbol_question.svg/16px-Symbol_question.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cd/Socrates.png/18px-Socrates.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/Nuvola_apps_kalzium.svg/28px-Nuvola_apps_kalzium.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8a/OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg/10px-OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg.png", "https://login.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAutoLogin/start?type=1x1", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/wikimedia-button.svg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/poweredby_mediawiki.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Contributors to Wikimedia projects" ]	2001-09-24T16:29:53+00:00		en	/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn	Not to be confused with Thomas Kuhn (Michigan politician). American philosopher of science (1922–1996) Thomas Samuel Kuhn ( ; 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. Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon "objectivity" alone. Science must account for subjective perspectives as well, since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/worldview of its researchers and participants. Early life, family and education [edit] Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Minette Stroock Kuhn and Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, both Jewish.[9] From kindergarten through fifth grade, he was educated at Lincoln School, a private progressive school in Manhattan, which stressed independent thinking rather than learning facts and subjects. The family then moved 40 mi (64 km) north to the small town of Croton-on-Hudson, New York where, once again, he attended a private progressive school – Hessian Hills School. It was here that, in sixth through ninth grade, he learned to love mathematics. He left Hessian Hills in 1937. He graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, in 1940.[10] He obtained his BSc degree in physics from Harvard College in 1943, where he also obtained MSc and PhD degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949, respectively, under the supervision of John Van Vleck. [11] As he states in the first few pages of the preface to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his three years of total academic freedom as a Harvard Junior Fellow were crucial in allowing him to switch from physics to the history and philosophy of science. Career [edit] Kuhn taught a course in the history of science at Harvard from 1948 until 1956, at the suggestion of university president James Conant. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the history of science in 1961. Kuhn interviewed and tape recorded Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before Bohr's death.[12] At Berkeley, he wrote and published (in 1962) his best known and most influential work:[13] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. He served as the president of the History of Science Society from 1969 to 1970.[14] In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [edit] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) was originally printed as an article in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, published by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. In this book, heavily influenced by the fundamental work of Ludwik Fleck (on the possible influence of Fleck on Kuhn see[15]), Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "paradigm shifts" (although he did not coin the phrase, he did contribute to its increase in popularity),[16] in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is followed by "normal science", when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by "puzzle-solving".[6]: 35–42 Guided by the paradigm, normal science is extremely productive: "when the paradigm is successful, the profession will have solved problems that its members could scarcely have imagined and would never have undertaken without commitment to the paradigm".[6]: 24–25 In regard to experimentation and collection of data with a view toward solving problems through the commitment to a paradigm, Kuhn states: The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not "the given" of experience but rather "the collected with difficulty." They are not what the scientist sees—at least not before his research is well advanced and his attention focused. Rather, they are concrete indices to the content of more elementary perceptions, and as such they are selected for the close scrutiny of normal research only because they promise opportunity for the fruitful elaboration of an accepted paradigm. Far more clearly than the immediate experience from which they in part derive, operations and measurements are paradigm-determined. Science does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that paradigm has partially determined. As a result, scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete laboratory manipulations.[6]: 126 During the period of normal science, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science. The difference between the normal and revolutionary science soon sparked the Kuhn-Popper debate. In SSR, Kuhn also argues that rival paradigms are incommensurable—that is, it is not possible to understand one paradigm through the conceptual framework and terminology of another rival paradigm. For many critics, for example David Stove (Popper and After, 1982), this thesis seemed to entail that theory choice is fundamentally irrational: if rival theories cannot be directly compared, then one cannot make a rational choice as to which one is better. Whether Kuhn's views had such relativistic consequences is the subject of much debate; Kuhn himself denied the accusation of relativism in the third edition of SSR, and sought to clarify his views to avoid further misinterpretation. Freeman Dyson has quoted Kuhn as saying "I am not a Kuhnian!",[17] referring to the relativism that some philosophers have developed based on his work. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the single most widely cited book in the social sciences.[18] The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides "paradigm shift", Kuhn popularized the word paradigm itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics and the work of Georg Lichtenberg to its current broader meaning, coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term "scientific revolutions" in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single scientific revolution in the late Renaissance. The frequent use of the phrase "paradigm shift" has made scientists more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that Kuhn's analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced that evolution.[citation needed] Kuhn's work has been extensively used in social science; for instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International Relations. Kuhn is credited as a foundational force behind the post-Mertonian sociology of scientific knowledge. Kuhn's work has also been used in the Arts and Humanities, such as by Matthew Edward Harris to distinguish between scientific and historical communities (such as political or religious groups): 'political-religious beliefs and opinions are not epistemologically the same as those pertaining to scientific theories'.[19] This is because would-be scientists' worldviews are changed through rigorous training, through the engagement between what Kuhn calls 'exemplars' and the Global Paradigm. Kuhn's notions of paradigms and paradigm shifts have been influential in understanding the history of economic thought, for example the Keynesian revolution,[20] and in debates in political science.[21] A defense Kuhn gives against the objection that his account of science from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions results in relativism can be found in an essay by Kuhn called "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice."[22] In this essay, he reiterates five criteria from the penultimate chapter of SSR that determine (or help determine, more properly) theory choice: Accurate – empirically adequate with experimentation and observation Consistent – internally consistent, but also externally consistent with other theories Broad Scope – a theory's consequences should extend beyond that which it was initially designed to explain Simple – the simplest explanation, principally similar to Occam's razor Fruitful – a theory should disclose new phenomena or new relationships among phenomena He then goes on to show how, although these criteria admittedly determine theory choice, they are imprecise in practice and relative to individual scientists. According to Kuhn, "When scientists must choose between competing theories, two men fully committed to the same list of criteria for choice may nevertheless reach different conclusions."[22] For this reason, the criteria still are not "objective" in the usual sense of the word because individual scientists reach different conclusions with the same criteria due to valuing one criterion over another or even adding additional criteria for selfish or other subjective reasons. Kuhn then goes on to say, "I am suggesting, of course, that the criteria of choice with which I began function not as rules, which determine choice, but as values, which influence it."[22] Because Kuhn utilizes the history of science in his account of science, his criteria or values for theory choice are often understood as descriptive normative rules (or more properly, values) of theory choice for the scientific community rather than prescriptive normative rules in the usual sense of the word "criteria", although there are many varied interpretations of Kuhn's account of science. Post-Structure philosophy [edit] Years after the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn dropped the concept of a paradigm and began to focus on the semantic aspects of scientific theories. In particular, Kuhn focuses on the taxonomic structure of scientific kind terms. In SSR he had dealt extensively with "meaning-changes". Later he spoke more of "terms of reference", providing each of them with a taxonomy. And even the changes that have to do with incommensurability were interpreted as taxonomic changes.[23] As a consequence, a scientific revolution is not defined as a "change of paradigm" anymore, but rather as a change in the taxonomic structure of the theoretical language of science.[24] Some scholars describe this change as resulting from a 'linguistic turn'.[25][26] In their book, Andersen, Barker and Chen use some recent theories in cognitive psychology to vindicate Kuhn's mature philosophy.[27] Apart from dropping the concept of a paradigm, Kuhn also began to look at the process of scientific specialisation. In a scientific revolution, a new paradigm (or a new taxonomy) replaces the old one; by contrast, specialisation leads to a proliferation of new specialties and disciplines. This attention to the proliferation of specialties would make Kuhn's model less 'revolutionary' and more "evolutionary". [R]evolutions, which produce new divisions between fields in scientific development, are much like episodes of speciation in biological evolution. The biological parallel to revolutionary change is not mutation, as I thought for many years, but speciation. And the problems presented by speciation (e.g., the difficulty in identifying an episode of speciation until some time after it has occurred, and the impossibility even then, of dating the time of its occurrence) are very similar to those presented by revolutionary change and by the emergence and individuation of new scientific specialties.[28] Some philosophers claim that Kuhn attempted to describe different kinds of scientific change: revolutions and specialty-creation.[29] Others claim that the process of specialisation is in itself a special case of scientific revolutions.[30] It is also possible to argue that, in Kuhn's model, science evolves through revolutions.[31] Polanyi–Kuhn debate [edit] Although they used different terminologies, both Kuhn and Michael Polanyi believed that scientists' subjective experiences made science a relativized discipline. Polanyi lectured on this topic for decades before Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Supporters of Polanyi charged Kuhn with plagiarism, as it was known that Kuhn attended several of Polanyi's lectures, and that the two men had debated endlessly over epistemology before either had achieved fame. After the charge of plagiarism, Kuhn acknowledged Polanyi in the Second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.[6]: 44 Despite this intellectual alliance, Polanyi's work was constantly interpreted by others within the framework of Kuhn's paradigm shifts, much to Polanyi's (and Kuhn's) dismay.[32] Honors [edit] Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963,[33] elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1974,[34] elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1979,[35] and, in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. He also received numerous honorary doctorates. In honor of his legacy, the Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award is awarded by the American Chemical Society to speakers who present original views that are at odds with mainstream scientific understanding. The winner is selected based on the novelty of the viewpoint and its potential impact if it were to be widely accepted.[36] Personal life [edit] Thomas Kuhn was married twice, first to Kathryn Muhs with whom he had three children, then to Jehane Barton Burns (Jehane B. Kuhn). In 1994, Kuhn was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in 1996. Bibliography [edit] Kuhn, T. S. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. ISBN 0-674-17100-4 Kuhn, T. S. The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science. Isis, 52 (1961): 161–193. Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. ISBN 0-226-45808-3 Kuhn, T. S. "The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research". pp. 347–369 in A. C. Crombie (ed.). Scientific Change (Symposium on the History of Science, University of Oxford, July 9–15, 1961). New York and London: Basic Books and Heineman, 1963. Kuhn, T. S. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977. ISBN 0-226-45805-9 Kuhn, T. S. Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ISBN 0-226-45800-8 Kuhn, T. S. The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-45798-2 Kuhn, T. S. The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. References [edit] Further reading [edit] Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen. The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0521855754 Alexander Bird. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press and Acumen Press, 2000. ISBN 1-902683-10-2 Steve Fuller. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-26894-2 Matthew Edward Harris. The Notion of Papal Monarchy in the Thirteenth Century: The Idea of Paradigm in Church History.' Lampeter and Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7734-1441-9. Paul Hoyningen-Huene Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ISBN 978-0226355511 Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Meaning Changes: A Study of Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy. AV Akademikerverlag, 2012. ISBN 978-3639444704 Errol Morris. The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-226-51384-3 Sal Restivo, The Myth of the Kuhnian Revolution. Sociological Theory, Vol. 1, (1983), 293–305.
7992	dbpedia	3	47	https://www.bookey.app/quote-author/thomas-s.-kuhn	en	30 Best Thomas S. Kuhn Quotes With Image	https://cdn.bookey.app/w…series/share.png	https://cdn.bookey.app/w…series/share.png	[ "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/logo.c1ef962f.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/logo3.3a93bda5.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/logo3.3a93bda5.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/quoteLogo.52d453ec.png", "https://cdn.bookey.app/web/deploy/assets/static/contetList.55e8a744.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "Thomas S. KuhnQuotes", "Thomas S. KuhnQuotes With Image" ]	null	[]	2023-07-25T18:34:11+08:00	1.The emergence of new paradigms is not only dependent on the discovery of new facts, but also on a shift in perspective.2.Normal science is the activity in which most scientists are ordinarily engaged; it is the puzzle-	en	/favicon.ico		https://www.bookey.app/quote-author/thomas-s.-kuhn	Thomas S. Kuhn \| Introduction Thomas S. Kuhn was an American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science who is best known for his influential work, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Kuhn was raised in a family of academic background, which greatly influenced his future pursuits. Kuhn attended Harvard University, where he initially studied physics but later shifted his focus to the history of science. This interdisciplinary background allowed Kuhn to develop a unique perspective that blended scientific training with a deep understanding of the historical and social dimensions of scientific inquiry. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," published in 1962, became a landmark book in the philosophy of science. In it, Kuhn challenged the prevailing view that scientific progress is always characterized by the accumulation of knowledge in a linear and continuous manner. Instead, he proposed the concept of "paradigm shifts" to describe how scientific knowledge shifts from one dominant framework (or paradigm) to another. According to Kuhn, scientific revolutions occur when anomalies and anomalies accumulate within a paradigm, leading to a crisis that ultimately results in a paradigm shift. This shift involves a radical change in the underlying assumptions, methodologies, and even the goals of scientific investigation. Kuhn argued that these shifts are not simply an accumulation of knowledge but a shift in the very way we understand and interpret the world. Kuhn's work had a profound impact on various disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, history, and the natural sciences. His ideas challenged the traditional view of science as a purely rational, objective enterprise and emphasized the role of social and psychological factors in the development and acceptance of scientific theories. Kuhn's work sparked intense debates and discussions among scholars and scientists, leading to further advancements in the philosophy and methodology of science. Many subsequent studies and publications were inspired by Kuhn's ideas, further solidifying his status as a pioneering figure in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, Kuhn held academic positions at various institutions, including the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received numerous accolades for his work, including the George Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society and the Thomas Jefferson Medal of the American Philosophical Society. Thomas S. Kuhn's legacy continues to shape our understanding of the nature of scientific progress, the dynamics of scientific communities, and the social and cultural dimensions of scientific revolutions. His work remains highly influential and is considered essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of science. 5 Facts About Thomas S. Kuhn 1. Kuhn's main work, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," was initially met with strong resistance from the scientific community. It challenged the traditional view of scientific progress as a steady accumulation of knowledge and instead proposed that scientific change occurs through paradigm shifts, where old theories are replaced by new ones. 2. Contrary to popular belief, Kuhn did not believe that science progresses towards ultimate truth. Instead, he argued that scientific knowledge is constructed within specific paradigms, which are frameworks that shape researchers' understanding of the world. According to Kuhn, there is no objective way to choose between competing paradigms; it often requires a shift in perception. 3. Kuhn's ideas influenced not only the philosophy of science but also numerous other fields, including sociology, history, and psychology. They provided a new lens through which to study how scientific communities work, how knowledge is generated, and how scientific revolutions shape society. 4. Kuhn's work highlighted the role of anomalies in scientific discovery. He argued that when anomalies—experimental results that cannot be explained within the existing paradigm—build up over time, they may trigger a scientific revolution. These revolutions then lead to the abandonment of old paradigms and the adoption of new ones. 5. Although Kuhn is primarily known for his work in the philosophy of science, he also had a fascination with the history of science. He believed that understanding the historical development of scientific knowledge was crucial for understanding the nature of scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts. Kuhn explored this historical perspective in his posthumously published work, "The Road Since Structure," which delves into the long-term impact of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Thomas S. Kuhn Related Book Summaries
7992	dbpedia	0	12	https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/kuhn	en	Kuhn	https://www.laphamsquart…pg?itok=tHWqaeSd	https://www.laphamsquart…pg?itok=tHWqaeSd	[ "https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=710572093141893&ev=PageView&noscript=1", "https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sites/default/files/styles/tall_rectangle_custom_user_small_2x/public/images/contributor/thomas_kuhn.jpg?itok=JEyA3Ajy&timestamp=1489076053", "https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sites/default/files/styles/contributor_block/public/images/contributor/1024px-jonathan_swift_by_charles_jervas_detail.jpg?itok=Go8KSJap", "https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sites/default/files/styles/contributor_block/public/images/contributor/thomas_kuhn.jpg?itok=DD-nJ6jf", "https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sites/default/files/styles/magazine/public/images/issue/discovery_cover_0.png?itok=IMKjG8Lq" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Kuhn obtained a PhD in physics from Harvard in 1949. He was a leading figure in the philosophy of science, and his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions introduced the term “paradigm shift” into American popular culture.	en	https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sites/all/themes/laphams_theme/favicon.ico	Lapham’s Quarterly	https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/kuhn	Thomas S. Kuhn Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Kuhn obtained a PhD in physics from Harvard in 1949. He was a leading figure in the philosophy of science, and his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions introduced the term “paradigm shift” into American popular culture.
7992	dbpedia	3	10	https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/kuhn/	en	Thomas Kuhn			[ "https://www.informationphilosopher.com/images/clear.gif", "https://www.informationphilosopher.com/images/WordPress.png", "https://www.informationphilosopher.com/images/Twitter0.png", "https://www.informationphilosopher.com/images/Facebook3.png", "https://www.informationphilosopher.com/images/YouTubeX.png", "https://www.informationphilosopher.com/images/nanoSky.gif", "https://www.informationphilosopher.com/images/CC.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "Information", "Philosopher", "Philosophy", "Freedom", "Values", "Knowledge", "Demons", "Determinism", "Dogmas", "Dualism", "Certainty", "Uncertainty", "Indeterminacy", "Entropy", "Randomness", "Microcosmos", "Macrocosmos", "Quantum Mechanics", "Thermodynamics", "Second Law" ]	null	[]	null	Information Philosopher is dedicated to the new Information Philosophy, with explanations for Freedom, Values, and Knowledge.		/favicon.ico		null	Thomas Kuhn is perhaps the best known philosopher of science. He claimed that the advance of scientific knowledge proceeds in discontinuous breaks that he called "revolutions" and which came to be known as "paradigm shifts." Kuhn suggested that basic scientific concepts and language terms that describe them change their meanings across these breaks, producing an incommensurability of ideas that make communications between scientists working in different paradigms difficult or even impossible. Kuhn is simply wrong about this. Any conceptual idea about any structure or process in the world that changes in a Kuhnian revolution can be described in the language terms used before and after the revolution by scientific experts who can provide an adequate translation between the terms. Kuhn came of age when analytic language philosophers were abandoning the logical positivism of Bertrand Russell and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein and their "truth tables." Even the logical empiricists of the Vienna Circle in Europe, with their theory that science advances by "verification" of observations came under attack. Kuhn's most famous work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first appeared as an article in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, a publication of the Vienna Circle. In philosophy of science, the logical empiricists were challenged by Karl Popper, who insisted that scientific theories stand and fall not on verification, but on his criterion of "falsification." This was flawed. Falsification is just a negative verification, equally likely to be overthrown by future scientific evidence. And all scientific theories rest on experimental evidence, not logical "proofs." Analytic language philosophy itself had a revolution against the logical "truth" of all knowledge, that all facts could be built up from "atomic facts." just as all matter is built up from atoms. Wittgenstein thought that language provided a "picture theory" of the world, that sentences can be framed as formal "propositions" like those in the great Principia Mathematica of Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. All mathematics and then all of science could be based upon these "logical atoms." This too was flawed. Behind this was the great philosophical and ultimately theological idea that the world and the universe are rationally constructed, so its structure can be understood by reason alone. This is called modernism, over against the idea of tradition, that knowledge is simply handed down from generation to generation by authorities. The first modern theology was Thomas Aquinas and other scholastics, who claimed revelation and reason could be reconciled. The first modern philosopher was René Descartes, whose work led to the age of enlightenment and the "laws" of modern science.. Modernists believe that reason can establish or "grounded" objective knowledge. Kuhn questioned the existence of "objective" knowledge, just when many philosophers of science were questioning the idea of an objective physical reality. Albert Einstein's theories of special and general relativity had made "relativism" fashionable in many fields. And quantum mechanics threatened the deterministic implications of classical physics. Structuralism in linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and the social sciences was the idea that universal structures underlie everything that human beings do, think, perceive, and feel. It gave way to post-structuralism, cultural relativism, and then postmodernism, or deconstruction. Kuhn was a postmodern, though perhaps a reluctant one, especially in the face of attacks on his idea of incommensurabiity by many scientists and philosophers. Where Kuhn was right is the idea that scientific progress is not made by works of individual thinkers who establish the objective truth about reality. Truth, especially objective or absolute truth, is a concept that is essential in mathematics and logic. The meaningful equivalent in science is the statistical evidence supporting various theories. Kuhn properly located progress in science in the scientific community as a whole. He saw the community of scientists as having only individual "subjective" positions. All "objective" knowledge is ultimately the result of "subjective," culturally biased, views of the individual scientists. "Objective" science is impossible Concerns about objectivity had been thought through in an earlier century by perhaps the greatest ever philosopher of science, Charles Sanders Peirce. He described a "community of inquirers" who could achieve "intersubjective agreement" in the long run. For Peirce, this agreement would be an approach, perhaps only asymptotic, to something like scientific "truth." Better than any other philosopher, Peirce articulated the difference between a priori probabilities and a posteriori statistics. He knew that probabilities are a priori theories and that statistics are a posteriori empirical measurements, the results of observations and experiments. The "truth" of any scientific theory is therefore always provisional, subject to change or incorporation into a larger, more comprehensive theory that explains all past evidentiary facts as well as newly discovered facts in the future. With Peirce in mind, we see that all science, like all knowledge (our SUM), is a living thing that is still growing. On Blackbody Radiation Kuhn's 1987 book Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 helped establish that Max Planck had no idea that light quanta were real, as Einstein proved. Normal \| Teacher \| Scholar
7992	dbpedia	0	45	https://us.ukessays.com/essays/sciences/scientific-revolutions-thomas-kuhns-theories-of-science.php	en	Scientific Revolutions: Thomas Kuhn's Theories of Science	https://us.ukessays.com/s/ukessays.gif	https://us.ukessays.com/s/ukessays.gif	[ "https://us.ukessays.com/images/icons/ukessays-logo.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/us.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/homepage/link-boxes/fair-use.jpg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/homepage/link-boxes/sign-in.jpg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/us.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/article/service-1.jpg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/article/service-2.jpg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/article/service-3.jpg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/humanity-university.png", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/ak-logo.png", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/footer/the-times-logo.png", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/footer/independent-logo.png", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/footer/bbc-logo.png", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/footer/daily-mail-logo.png", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/us.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/uk.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/ae.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/bh.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/kw.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/sa.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/qa.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/sg.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/hk.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/om.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/202.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/footer/footer-payment-logos.png", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/uk.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/us.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/ae.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/sa.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/bh.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/kw.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/om.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/qa.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/sg.svg", "https://us.ukessays.com/images/flags/hk.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Business Bliss FZE" ]	2023-11-06T20:30:17+00:00	The Scientific Revolutions and its Structure  In this essay I am going to discuss what the scientific revolution was and who was of importance at that time. I am also going to discu	en	/apple-touch-icon.png		https://us.ukessays.com/essays/sciences/scientific-revolutions-thomas-kuhns-theories-of-science.php	The Scientific Revolutions and its Structure In this essay I am going to discuss what the scientific revolution was and who was of importance at that time. I am also going to discuss more about Thomas Kuhn’s theories of science and discuss Karl Poppers theories of science. I am also going to give my outlook on the scientific revolution, the problems that Khun and Popper faced during their discoveries, and the most talked about theories from Kuhn through out this essay. HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Scientific Revolution had many great minds that made an impact at the time and continued to where we are today in science, medicien, and technology. Some of the important thinkers of the Scientific Revolution were; Andreas Vesalius, Giordano Bruno, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Paracelsus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Nicolaus Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton. They all had one thing in common being very smart thinkers and changing the way for the discovery of modern science. A influential philosopher of science came to be known in the twentieth century. Some scientis say he was the most influential one of time. His name is Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was and still is known for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This book not only talks about the “Paradigm Shift” (which I will bring up later in this essay) but this book also changed the way mankind thinks about how mankind attempts to understand the world in an organized and structured way. Another influential philosopher of science in the twentieth century was Karl Popper (1902-1994) born in Australia. He was well known for his theory of Criterion of falsifiability. This means that, in the philosophy of science, a standard of evaluation of putatively scientific theories, according to which a theory is genuinely scientific only if it is possible in principle to establish that it is false (Britannica). Now both philosophers explained how the philosophy of science was bias towards physics by scientist. Karl Popper explained that no amount of data points could really prove a theory. However, a single key data point can disprove it. A few theories that help this falsification were quantum mechanics and relativity. As science evolves falsification become less reliable and more complicated. A main reason falsification has become less reliable is that the modern science is based on models and not theories. Modern science has test that are ran, data that is collected, retested, and test that are solved and/or gives us prof and facts. These models can be retested and have different variables added to the models, which then lead to different results. When it comes to Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific progress better know as a “paradigm shift” there was an objection to it by the scientific community. Philosopher Arun Bala accused Thomas Kuhn of having being biased towards the Western civilization. Thomas Kuhn responded in writing: “[O]nly the civilizations that descend from Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe…No other place and time has supported the very special communities from which scientific productivity comes.” (Kuhn 12). There were others who question and accused Thomas Kuhn. However, I enjoyed reading what Thomas Kuhn wrote to Philosopher Arun Bala. I felt Thomas Kuhn was polite, forward, and truthful in his words. Kuhn believes the paradigms are incommensurable, even though they may provide different explanations of the same phenomenon, such as the different definitions of mass in Einsteinian versus Newtonian physics (Adams 17). Thomas Kuhn’s scientific theories had limitations because his theories could not account for past scientific advancements that happened outside of the “paradigm shift”. Now lets talk about Thomas Kuhn’s theory of how the “paradigm shift” and came to be. Thomas Kuhn talks about normal science, but what really is normal science? Normal science “means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice” (Kuhn 12). However there can be a shift in normal science meaning new theories and/or paradigms can be allowed. When this occurs a shift takes place with either theory or fact. When this occurs there is a cycle in a paradigm shift; first is the pre-science, second is the normal science, third is the model drift, fourth is the model crisis, fifth is the model revolution, and last it the paradigm change. The one cycle that I find the most interesting is the model crisis. The model crisis is when the model drift is broken. It can no longer be a reliable guide to solving the problem. The other steps were also of importance for instance pre-science is a non-workable step. Normal science is when there is a baseline for understanding a theory that works. Model drift is where we start to understand what is going on in the experiment but the end results cannot be explained and the results do not make sense. Model revolution begins when a new model is thought of because the recent one did not work. Finally you have the paradigm change where a new idea emerges from an old one, and a shift occurs. I find this to hold true in real life science experiments. As Thomas Kuhn said I have argued so far only that paradigms are constitutive of science. Now I wish to display a sense in which they are constitutive of nature as well (Godfrey-Smith 03). This then leads to Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shift” theory to continue to be in favor of science experiments today. Thomas Kuhn said “he was convinced that not only are there scientificrevolutions but also that they have a structure”(Hacking 12). Which then leads me back to the Scientific Revolution, because these brilliant philosophers’ would not have made great advancements in science like they did. The Scientific Revolution was and is the biggest shift in the world of science since modern science. There were deveolpments in astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and medicine that changed the views of society. Britiancica’s definition of the scientific revolution is drastic change in scientific thought that took place during the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries (Britannica). This unfolded in Europe around 1550-1700 this was towards the end of the Renaissance era. This was the improvement for how we thought and how the world was ran. Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) was the person to start the Scientific Revolution with his theory that the sun is at the centered of the Universe and that the Earth is on an axis that spins around once daily. Then came Issac Newton (1642-1727) whos theories where on Universal Laws. In mechanics, his three laws of motion, the basic principles of modern physics, resulted in the formulation of the law of universal gravitation (Britannica). Towards the end of the eighteenth century the scientific revolution community name this era “Age of Reflection”. These scientific views changed the way society worked at that time. People began to question many things even what the leaders where telling them, some even questioned religion. This gave people a sense of freedom of thinking outside the normal every day life. Along with the good points of the Scientific Revolution there was some theories and discoveries that created war, “It is stated that the scientific revolution has made wars irrational and deprived diplomacy of it most important tool, which is plausible war threats, culminating in the discovery of nuclear bombs and ocean-spanning missiles” (Rabinowitch 63). Unfortunately there will always be people in this world that will use science for advancement and war. Hopefully as we evolve we can move past science being in the wrong hands of people. CONCLUSION The philosophers and the scientist, men/woman who lead the way for the scientific revolution made great leaps and bounds in the world of science as we know today. If it was not for these men/women the world would not be where we are today with out technology and science discoveries. What if Nicholas Copernicus never discovered that the sun is centered? Think about the ripple in our time. Where would we be at today? I believe things happened and happen for a reason especially when it comes to the field of science and technology. I look forward to seeing in my lifetime where science will lead us the next. I feel there is so much more to learn from the philosophers and scientist, plus there are so many more that contributed to the Scientific Revolution. I wonder and have a gut feeling that there were people from those times who thought of these theories and experiments to have someone else take credit for them. If we ever found out the truth I am sure there would be a shift in the science world, as we know. Thank you for taking the time to read my essay I hope I was able to shed some light on the Scientific Revolution, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, and their theories that made them famous both positive and negative in the science world. Notes Please note that any direct quotes from Thomas Kuhn’s texts are written in their original form, which may contain grammar mistakes according to twenty-first century grammar rules. 2. I feel that I was trying to get out some main points of the Scientific Revolution, and Thomas Kuhn and I feel that it was so much more than what I talked about. Works Cited
7992	dbpedia	3	8	https://www.simplypsychology.org/kuhn-paradigm.html	en	Thomas Kuhn: Paradigm Shift	https://www.simplypsycho…s/kuhn-cycle.jpg	https://www.simplypsycho…s/kuhn-cycle.jpg	[ "https://www.simplypsychology.org/wp-content/uploads/Simply-Psychology-Mobile-Logo2.jpg", "https://www.simplypsychology.org/wp-content/uploads/Simply-Psychology-Logo.jpg", "https://www.simplypsychology.org/wp-content/uploads/Simply-Psychology-Logo.jpg", "https://www.simplypsychology.org/wp-content/uploads/kuhn-cycle.jpg", "https://www.simplypsychology.org/wp-content/uploads/three-icons-with-text-light-blue.jpg", "https://www.simplypsychology.org/wp-content/uploads/Olivia-Guy-Evans.jpg", "https://www.simplypsychology.org/wp-content/uploads/saul-mcleod.jpg", "https://cdn.printfriendly.com/buttons/new/three-icons-with-text-light-blue.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Saul McLeod, PhD" ]	2022-11-03T01:08:43+00:00	Thomas Kuhn attacks “development-by-accumulation” views of science, which hold that science progresses linearly by accumulating theory-independent facts.	en	https://www.simplypsycho…d-logo-32x32.jpg	Simply Psychology	https://www.simplypsychology.org/kuhn-paradigm.html	Phase 2: Normal Science (most common – science is usually stable) A paradigm is established, which lays the foundations for legitimate work within the discipline. Scientific work then consists of the articulation of the paradigm in solving puzzles that it throws up. A paradigm is a conventional basis for research; it sets a precedent. Puzzles that resist solutions are seen as anomalies. Anomalies are tolerated and do not cause the rejection of the theory, as scientists are confident these anomalies can be explained over time. Scientists spend much of their time in the Model Drift step, battling anomalies that have appeared. They may or may not know this or acknowledge it. It is necessary for normal science to be uncritical. If all scientists were critical of a theory and spent time trying to falsify it, no detailed work would ever get done. Phase 3: Crisis This is where the paradigm shift occurs. Anomalies become serious, and a crisis develops if the anomalies undermine the basic assumptions of the paradigm and attempt to remove them consistently fail. Under these circumstances, the rules for applying the paradigm become relaxed. Ideas that challenge the existing paradigm are developed. In a crisis, there will be ‘extraordinary science’ where there will be several competing theories. If the anomalies can be resolved, the crisis is over, and normal science resumes. If not, there is a scientific revolution that involves a change of paradigm. Phase 4: Revolution Eventually, a new paradigm will be established, but not because of any logically compelling justification. The reasons for the choice of a paradigm are largely psychological and sociological. The new paradigm better explains the observations and offers a model that is closer to the objective, external reality. Different paradigms are held to be incommensurable — the new paradigm cannot be proven or disproven by the rules of the old paradigm, and vice versa. There is no natural measure or scale for ranking different paradigms. Critical Evaluation The enormous impact of Thomas Kuhn’s work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides “paradigm shift”, Kuhn raised the word “paradigm” itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics to its current broader meaning. The frequent use of the phrase “paradigm shift” has made scientists more aware of and, in many cases, more receptive to paradigm changes, so Kuhn’s analysis of the evolution of scientific views has, by itself, influenced that evolution. For Kuhn, the choice of paradigm was sustained by, but not ultimately determined by, logical processes. Kuhn believed that it represented the consensus of the community of scientists. Acceptance or rejection of some paradigm is, he argued, a social process as much as a logical process. This means Kuhn has been accused of being a relativist. Maybe all the theories are equally valid? Why should we believe in today’s science when it might be overturned in the future? Kuhn vigorously rejected this, claiming that scientific revolutions have always led to new, more accurate theories and represent true progress. Does science make progress through scientific revolutions? Are later paradigms better than earlier ones? No, Kuhn suggests, they are just different. The scientific revolutions that supplant one paradigm with another do not take us closer to the truth about how the world is. Successive paradigms are incommensurable. Kuhn says that a later paradigm may be a better instrument for solving puzzles than an earlier one. But if each paradigm defines its own puzzles, what is a puzzle for one paradigm may be no puzzle at all for another. So why is it progressive to replace one paradigm with another which solves puzzles that the earlier paradigm does not even recognize? Kuhn used his incommensurability thesis to disprove the view that paradigm shifts are objective. Truth is relative to the paradigm. Science does not change its paradigm overnight. Younger scientists take a new paradigm forward. As Kuhn put it, “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Thomas Kuhn showed contemporary philosophers could not ignore the history of science and the social context in which science takes place. Science is a product of the society in which it is practiced. References
7992	dbpedia	0	28	https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn	en	Thomas Samuel Kuhn	https://www.newworldency…avicon-32x32.png	https://www.newworldency…avicon-32x32.png	[ "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/images/nwe_header.jpg", "https://static.newworldencyclopedia.org/skins/common/images/Cc.logo.circle.png", "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/resources/assets/poweredby_mediawiki_88x31.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	https://static.newworldencyclopedia.org/favicon.ico		https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn	Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions and innovations in the philosophy of science. More than a million copies of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, were printed, and it became the most studied and discussed text in philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had far reaching impacts on diverse fields of study beyond the philosophy of science, particularly on social sciences. Key concepts Kuhn presented in this work, such as "paradigm" and "incommensurability," became popular beyond academics. Life Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and his wife Minette Stroock Kuhn. The family was Jewish on both sides, although they were non-practicing. His father had been trained as a hydraulic engineer and had gone to Harvard. When he was six months old, the family moved to New York City, and the young Kuhn attended progressive schools there, and later in the upstate New York area. Kuhn entered Harvard University in 1940 and obtained his bachelor's degree in physics after three years in 1943, his master's in 1946 and Ph.D. in 1949. While there, primarily because of his editorship of the Harvard Crimson, he came to the attention of then Harvard president James Bryant Conant, and eventually gained Conant's sponsorship for becoming a Harvard Fellow. Conant would also be extremely influential in Kuhn’s career, encouraging him to write the book that would become The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first ed. published in 1962). After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California at Berkeley in both the philosophy and the history departments, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. Kuhn had entered Harvard as a physics major, intending to study theoretical physics. He did go on to get his degrees in physics. But as an undergraduate he took a course in philosophy and, although this was completely new to him, he was fascinated with it. He especially took to Kant. Later he would say that his own position was Kantian, but with movable categories. Sometime around 1947 Kuhn began teaching what had before been Conant’s course, “Understanding Science.” This course could be thought of as an elementary course in the history and philosophy of science. This led Kuhn to begin focusing on the history of science. He also had his “Eureka moment”—maybe better called an “Aristotle moment”—in the summer of 1947. As a 1991 article in Scientific American put it, Kuhn “was working toward his doctorate in physics at Harvard …when he was asked to teach some science to undergraduate humanities majors. Searching for a simple case history that could illuminate the roots of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle's Physics and was astonished at how ‘wrong’ it was [when understood in Newtonian terms]… Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the window of his dormitory room… when suddenly Aristotle ‘made sense.’” Concerning what he found in Aristotle, Kuhn wrote, “How could [Aristotle’s] characteristic talents have deserted his so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had so deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? Those questions troubled me. I could easily believe that Aristotle had stumbled, but not that, on entering physics, he had totally collapsed. Might not the fault be mine, rather than Aristotle’s, I asked myself. Perhaps his words had not always meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine” (The Road Since Structure, 16). Kuhn reported that, in his window-gazing, “Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together.” As the Scientific American article put it, “Kuhn … realized that Aristotle's views of such basic concepts as motion and matter were totally unlike Newton's… Understood on its own terms, Aristotle's Physics ‘wasn't just bad Newton,’ Kuhn says; it was just different.” This insight would go on to underlie most of his subsequent work in history and philosophy of science. Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, and in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science. He was also awarded numerous honorary doctorates. Kuhn suffered cancer of the bronchial tubes for the last two years of his life and died Monday, June 17, 1996. He was survived by his wife Jehane R. Kuhn, his ex-wife Kathryn Muhs Kuhn, and their three children, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Nathaniel. The Copernican Revolution (1957) In his lifetime, Kuhn published more than a hundred papers and reviews, as well as five books (the fifth published posthumously). His first book—he had already published a few papers and reviews in various journals—was The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Harvard University Press, 1957), with a forward by Conant. This book began out of lectures he had given to the students at Harvard, and was completed after he went to Berkeley. It may be seen as a prolegomena to his later and most important, and far more influential, book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in that in Copernican Revolution Kuhn introduced a number of the points that would be further developed in the later book. Kuhn emphasized that the Copernican Revolution “event was plural. Its core was a transformation of mathematical astronomy, but it embraced conceptual changes in cosmology, physics, philosophy, and religion as well.” The Copernican revolution, Kuhn clamed, shows “how and with what effect the concepts of many different fields are woven into a single fabric of thought.” And “…filiations between distinct fields of thought appear in the period after the publication of Copernicus’ work. …[This work] could only be assimilated by men able to create a new physics, a new conception of space, and a new idea of man’s relation to God. …Specialized accounts [of the Copernican Revolution] are inhibited both by aim and method from examining the nature of these ties and their effects upon the growth of human knowledge.” Kuhn claimed that this effort to show the Copernican Revolution’s plurality is “probably the book’s most important novelty.” But also it is novel in that it “repeatedly violates the institutional boundaries which separate the audience for ‘science’ from the audience for ‘history’ or ‘philosophy.’ Occasionally it may seem to be two books, one dealing with science, the other with intellectual history.” The seven chapters of Copernican Revolution deal with what Kuhn called “The Ancient Two-Sphere Universe,” “The Problem of the Planets [in Ptolemaic cosmology],” “The Two-Sphere Universe in Aristotelian Thought,” “Recasting the Tradition: Aristotle to Copernicus,” “Copernicus’ Innovation,” “The Assimilation of Copernican Astronomy,” and “The New Universe” as it came to be understood after the revolution in thinking. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first ed. 1962), Kuhn claimed that science does not evolve gradually toward truth, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he called "paradigm shifts." Ironically, this book was originally printed as a volume in the International Encyclopedia for Unified Science, which was conceived and published by the Vienna circle—the logical positivists. It is ironic because Kuhn seemed to be an arch anti-positivist (although that claim about him came to be doubted in the 1990s). The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured by the revolution it brought about even in the vocabulary of the history and philosophy of science. Besides “paradigm” and “paradigm shifts,” Kuhn coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term “scientific revolutions” in the plural, taking place at different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single "Scientific Revolution" in the late Renaissance. Kuhn began this book by declaring that there should be a role for history in theory of science, and that this can produce a “decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” Moreover, the textbooks used to teach the next generation of scientists, offer “a concept of science … no more likely to fit the enterprise that produced them than an image of a national culture drawn from a tourist brochure or a language text” (p. 1). He also declared that “methodological directives” are insufficient “to dictate a unique substantive conclusion to many sorts of scientific questions” (3). Next, Kuhn introduced his notion of “normal science” and said that it “means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice” (10). These achievements can be called “paradigms,” a term much used by Kuhn and a central point of Kuhn’s theory—for better or worse. Paradigms, according to Kuhn, are essential to science. “In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant” (15). Moreover, “no natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism” (16-17). “Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute.” Normal science, then, is a puzzle-solving activity consisting of mopping-up activities, guided by the reigning paradigm. “Rules derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide science even in the absence of rules” (42). “Normal research, which is cumulative, owes its success to the ability of scientists regularly to select problems that can be solved with conceptual and instrumental techniques close to those already in existence" (96). Over time, however, new and unsuspected phenomena—anomalies—are uncovered by scientific research, things that will not fit into the reigning paradigm. When a sufficient failure of normal science to solve the emerging anomalies occurs, a crises results, and this eventually leads to the emergence of a new scientific theory, a revolution. A reorientation occurs that breaks with one tradition and introduces a new one. Kuhn stated that the new paradigm is incompatible and incommensurable with the old one. Such “scientific revolutions are … non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one” (92). This crisis and its accompanying revolution lead to a division of camps and polarization within the science, with one camp striving to hold onto and defend the old paradigm or institutional constellation, while the other upholds and seeks to have the new one replace the old one. “That difference [between competing paradigms] could not occur if the two were logically compatible. In the process of being assimilated, the second must displace the first” (97). Moreover, proponents of the two cannot really speak with each other, for “To the extent … that two scientific schools disagree about what is a problem and what is a solution, they will inevitably talk through each other when debating the relative merits of their respective paradigms” (109). Scientific revolutions amount to changes of world view. Scientific revolutions, Kuhn claied, tend to be invisible because they “have customarily been viewed not as revolutions but as additions to scientific knowledge” (136). This is primarily because of textbooks, which “address themselves to an already articulated body of problems, data, and theory, most often to the particular set of paradigms to which the scientific community is committed at the time they are written.” Textbooks, popularizations, and philosophy of science all “record the stable outcome of past revolutions” and are “systematically misleading” (137). “Textbooks … are produced only in the aftermath of a scientific revolution. They are the bases for a new tradition of normal science” (144). Moreover, “depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession” (138). Although it may superficially resemble or mimic them, neither verification, as claimed by the positivists, nor falsification, as propounded by Popper, are the methods by which theory change actually occurs. Instead, Kuhn claimed, something resembling religious conversion happens. A new paradigm first needs a few supporters—usually younger people who are not committed or beholden to the older one. “Probably the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they can solve the problems that have led the old one to a crisis” (153). The main issue in circumstances of competing paradigms is “which paradigm will in the future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely (157). Because of that “a decision is called for” (157) and “in the circumstances that decision must be based less on past achievement than future promise” (157-158). But Kuhn denied that “new paradigms triumph ultimately through some mystical aesthetic” (158). The remaining central question for growth of scientific knowledge is, Kuhn acknowledged, “Why should the enterprise [he sketches in his theory] … move steadily ahead in ways that, say, art, political theory, or philosophy does not” (160). He suggested that the answer is partly semantic because, “To a very great extent the term ‘science’ is reserved for fields that do progress in obvious ways.” This is shown "in the recurrent debates about whether one or another of the contemporary social sciences is really a science” (160). Kuhn declared that “we tend to see as science any field in which progress is marked” (162). “It is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assured” (163). But, he asked, “Why should progress also be the apparently universal concomitant of scientific revolutions?” He answered that “Revolutions close with a total victory for one of the opposing camps. Will that group ever say that the result of its victory has been something less than progress? That would be rather like admitting that they had been wrong and their opponents right” (166). “The very existence of science,” he wrote, “depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community” (167). And, “a group of this sort must see a paradigm change as progress” (169). But Kuhn denied that a paradigm change of the kind he describes leads toward the truth. “We may … have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes in paradigms carry scientists and those who learn from them closer to the truth” (170). But this is no great loss because, he asked, “Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal? If we can learn to substitute evolution-from-what-we-do-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know, a number of very vexing problems may vanish in the process” (171). Moreover, “the entire process may have occurred, as we now suppose biological evolution did, without benefit of a set goal, a permanent fixed scientific truth, of which each stage in the development of scientific knowledge is a better example” (172-173). Criticism of Kuhn Many people responded to Kuhn’s work, and the responses ranged from extremely favorable to highly critical. Dudley Shapere gave a harshly critical review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in Philosophical Review 73 (1964). W.V.O. Quine wrote that Kuhn's work contributed to a wave of “epistemological nihilism.” Quine continued, "This mood is reflected in the tendency of … Kuhn … to belittle the role of evidence and to accentuate cultural relativism"(Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, p. 87). Some people praised Kuhn’s opening to consideration of the sociology and psychology of science. Others—Karl Popper, for an important example—condemned this as a prostitution, or at least severe misrepresentation, of science. Some claimed that Kuhn’s work was progressive in that it opened the door to a new and fresh understanding of what science is and how it operates. But Steve Fuller, in Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, claimed that Kuhn’s work is reactionary because Kuhn tried to remove science from public examination and democratic control. One of the most important and influential examinations of Kuhn’s work took place at the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, held at Bedford College, Regent’s Park, London, on July 11-17, 1965, with Popper presiding. The proceedings are gathered in a book entitled Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. In that colloquium, John Watkins argued against normal science. Steven Toulmin asked whether the distinction between normal and revolutionary science holds water. Margaret Masterman pointed out that Kuhn’s use of “paradigm” was highly plastic—she showed more than twenty different usages. L. Pearce Williams claimed that few, if any, scientists recorded in the history of science were "normal" scientists in Kuhn’s sense; i.e. Williams disagreed with Kuhn both about historical facts and about what is characteristic for science. Others then and since have argued that Kuhn was mistaken in claiming that two different paradigms are incompatible and incommensurable because, in order for things to be incompatible, they must be directly comparable or commensurable. Popper himself admitted that Kuhn had caused him to notice the existence of normal science, but Popper regarded normal science as deplorable because, Popper claimed, it is unimaginative and plodding. He pointed out that Kuhn’s theory of science growing through revolutions fits only some sciences because some other sciences have in fact been cumulative—a point made by numerous other critics of Kuhn. In addition, Popper claimed that Kuhn really does have a logic of scientific discovery: The logic of historical relativism. He and others pointed out that in claiming that a new paradigm is incommensurable and incompatible with an older one Kuhn was mistaken because, Popper claimed, “a critical comparison of the competing theories, of the competing frameworks, is always possible.” (Popper sometimes called this the "myth of the framework.") Moreover, Popper continued, “In science (and only in science) can we say that we have made genuine progress: That we know more than we did before” (Lakatos & Musgrave, 57). Kuhn responded in an essay entitled “Reflections on my Critics.” In it he discussed further the role of history and sociology, the nature and functions of normal science, the retrieval of normal science from history, irrationality and theory choice, and the question of incommensurability and paradigms. Among many other things, he claimed that his account of science, notwithstanding some of his critics, did not sanction mob rule; that it was not his view that “adoption of a new scientific theory is an intuitive or mystical affair, a matter for psychological description rather than logical or methodological codification” (Lakaos & Musgrave, 261) as, for example, Israel Scheffler had claimed in his book Science and Subjectivity—a claim that has been made against Kuhn by numerous other commentators, especially David Stove—and that translation (from one paradigm or theory to another) always involves a theory of translation and that the possibility of translation taking place does not make the term “conversion” inappropriate (Lakatos & Musgrave, 277). Kuhn’s work (and that of many other philosophers of science) was examined in The Structure of Scientific Theories, ed. with a Critical Introduction by Frederick Suppe. There Kuhn published an important essay entitled “Second Thoughts on Paradigms” in which he admitted that his use of that term had been too plastic and indefinite and had caused confusion, and he proposed replacing it with “disciplinary matrix.” (Suppe, 463) In an “Afterward” to the 1977 Second Edition of this work, Suppe claimed that there had been a waning of the influence of what he dubbed the Weltanschauungen views of science such as that of Kuhn. Examination and criticism of Kuhn's work—pro and con, with the con side dominant among philosophers, but the pro side tending to be supported by sociologists of science and by deconstructionists and other irrationalists—continues into the twenty first century. Kuhn is frequently attacked as a purveyor of irrationalism and of the view that science is a subjective enterprise with no objective referent—a view Kuhn strongly denied that he held or supported. One problem is that Kuhn tended to complain that his critics misunderstood and misrepresented him and that he did not hold what they represented him as holding—even though they could point to passages in which he seemed to say explicitly what they claimed he held—but he did not give them much in response that would serve to show that they were wrong or that he actually held to any defensible form of scientific rationalism. Since he gave up the notion of an external referent or “ultimate truth” as the aim or goal of science, it was nearly impossible for him to specify anything except a completely conventionalist account of growth or progress in scientific knowledge. On the question of Kuhn's relationship to logical positivism (or logical empiricism), George Reisch—in a 1991 essay entitled “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?”—argued that Kuhn did not do so because there were two previously unpublished letters from Rudolf Carnap (Carnap was regarded by most observers as being the strongest, most important, or arch-logical positivist) to Kuhn in which Carnap expressed strong approval of Kuhn’s work, suggesting that there was a closer relationship between Kuhn and logical positivism than had been previously recognized. "Post-Kuhnian" philosophy of science produced extensive responses to and critiques of the apparently relativistic and skeptical implications of Kuhn's work—implications Kuhn himself disowned. But, as noted above, Kuhn's disowning of those implications is puzzling and perhaps even disingenuous, given what Kuhn actually wrote on those topics. Kuhn’s work after Structure Kuhn published three additional books after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. They were The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977), Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894-1912 (1978; 1984; and reprinted in 1987 with an afterword, “Revisiting Planck”), and The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview (Ed. by James Conant and John Haugeland, published posthumously, 2000). Subsequent editions of The Copernican Revolution were published in 1959, 1966, and 1985. A second revised edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1970, and a third edition in 1996. Essential Tension and The Road Since Structure were mostly collections of previously published essays, except that Road contains a long and informative interview-discussion with him conducted in Athens, Greece, on October 19-21, 1995, by three Greek interviewers; the occasion was the awarding of an honorary doctorate by the Department of Philosophy and History of Philosophy by the University of Athens and a symposium there in his honor. Understandably, given the importance of Structure and the enormous outpouring of interest and criticism it provoked, almost all of Kuhn's work after it consisted of further discussions and defenses of things he had written, responses to critics, and some modifications of positions he had taken. During his professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kuhn worked in linguistics. That may not have been an especially important or productive aspect of his work. But in his response "Reflections on my Critics," especially section 6 entitled "Incommensurability and Paradigms," where he wrote "At last we arrive at the central constellation of issues which separate me from most of my critics," Kuhn wrote about linguistic issues, and that set of problems or issues may have been the focus of his later work at MIT. Understanding of Kuhn's work in Europe In France, Kuhn's conception of science has been related to Michel Foucault (with Kuhn's paradigm corresponding to Foucault's episteme) and Louis Althusser, although both are more concerned by the historical conditions of possibility of the scientific discourse. (Foucault, in fact, was most directly influenced by Gaston Bachelard, who had developed independently a view of the history of scientific change similar to Kuhn's, but—Kuhn claimed—too rigid.) Thus, they do not consider science as isolated from society as they argue that Kuhn does. In contrast to Kuhn, Althusser's conception of science is that it is cumulative, even though this cumulativity is discontinuous (see his concept of Louis Althusser's "epistemological break") whereas Kuhn considers various paradigms as incommensurable. Kuhn's work has also been extensively used in social science; for instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International Relations. References ISBN links support NWE through referral fees Primary Sources (In chronological order) Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957, 1959, 1965. —The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. —The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977. —Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. —The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993. Ed. by James Conant and John Haugeland Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. (This book contains a complete bibliography of Kuhn's writings and other presentations.) Secondary Sources Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton: Princeton University Press and Acumen Press, 2000. Einstein, Albert and Leopold Infeld. The Evolution of Physics New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938. Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Lakatos, Imre and Alan Musgrave, Eds, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. London: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Lakatos, Imre and Paul Feyerabend. For and Against Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Quine, W.V. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Raymo, Chet. “A New Paradigm for Thomas Kuhn,” Scientific American. September, 2000. Reisch, George. “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?” Philosophy of Science 58 (1991). Rothman, Milton A. A Physicist's Guide to Skepticism. Prometheus, 1988. Sardar, Ziauddin. Thomas Kuhn and the Science Wars. Totem Books, 2000. Scheffler, Israel. Science and Subjectivity. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1967 Shapere, Dudley. “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Philosophical Review. 73, 1964. (A review of Kuhn's book.) Stove, David. Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult. Transaction Publishers, 2001. Suppe, Frederick. The Structure of Scientific Theories, Second Ed. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977 Wolpert, Lewis. The Unnatural Nature of Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. All links retrieved April 30, 2023. Thomas Kuhn, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. General Philosophy Sources
7992	dbpedia	1	72	https://12min.com/authors/thomas-kuhn	en	Thomas Kuhn	https://12min.com/assets…en/logo_full.png	https://12min.com/assets…en/logo_full.png	[ "https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=375260210029616&ev=PageView&noscript=1", "https://12min.com/assets/images//logo.svg", "https://cdn.12min.com/books/books_background/61306_shutterstock_1395147236.site_thumb.jpg?1611776777", "https://12min.com/assets/images//logo_white.svg", "https://12min.com/assets/images//market-app.png", "https://12min.com/assets/images//market-google.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	12min is a platform that chooses, reads and summarizes the most important non-fiction books. Start your free trial and discover a faster way of learning!	en	/icons/apple-icon-57x57.png	12minutos App	null	Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American philosopher of science, historian, and physicist. He is best known today as the author of the 1962 landmark study of scientific progress, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Kuhn’s other books include “The Copernican Revolution” and “Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912.” He died from lung cancer at the age of 73, on June 17, 1996.
7992	dbpedia	1	25	https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn	en	Thomas Kuhn	https://en.citizendium.org/images/favicon1.ico	https://en.citizendium.org/images/favicon1.ico	[ "https://s9.addthis.com/button1-share.gif", "https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/images/4/4f/Statusbar2.png", "https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/images/thumb/1/1f/Subpages.png/14px-Subpages.png", "https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/images/thumb/4/4f/Metadata.png/14px-Metadata.png", "https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/images/thumb/0/07/Print_button.png/17px-Print_button.png", "https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/resources/assets/licenses/cc-by-nc-sa.png", "https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/resources/assets/poweredby_mediawiki_88x31.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	/images/favicon1.ico		null	Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1921 – June 22, 1996) was an American philosopher and historian of science. His most famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, revolutionized the philosophy of science and has become one of the most cited academic books of all time. His contribution to the philosophy of science marked a break with key positivist doctrines and began a new style of philosophy of science that brought it much closer to the history of science. The general thrust of his book is that science operates on the model of paradigms which are clung to until a scientific revolution or paradigm shift happens. As examples, he used the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, as well as the shift from pre-Darwinian to post-Darwinian biology. "... while Kuhn thus opened up the entire domain of science for political analysis, he argued that the behaviorally visible mark of a truly scientific community was its high degree of autonomy, its ability to exercise authority over its own intellectual affairs. He confirmed the instinct that science was really different. But he also showed that scientists, within their domain, behaved very much like the rest of us." – David Hollinger, writing in the New York Times.[1] Kuhn's life and career Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He was awarded a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943 graduating summa cum laude, and spent the remaining war years at Harvard researching into radar. He gained a master's degree in 1946, and a PhD in physics in 1949 for a thesis concerned an application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics. From 1948 until 1956 he taught a course in the history of science at Harvard, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department. There, he wrote and published (in 1962), at the age of forty, his major work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Most of his subsequent career was spent in articulating and developing the ideas developed within it. In 1964 he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1978 he published Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 and in 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In 1982 he was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. In 1994 he was diagnosed with cancer of the bronchial tubes; he died in 1996.[2] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions For more information, see: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (book).
7992	dbpedia	0	69	https://news.mit.edu/1996/kuhn-0724	en	Fall memorial planned for Professor T.S. Kuhn	https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico	https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico	[ "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	1996-07-24T09:00:00+00:00		en	/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico	MIT News \| Massachusetts Institute of Technology	https://news.mit.edu/1996/kuhn-0724	An MIT memorial service will be held in the fall for Professor Emeritus Thomas S. Kuhn, who died June 17 at his home in Cambridge at the age of 73. He had been ill for the last two years with cancer of the bronchial tubes and throat. Professor Kuhn was an internationally known historian and philosopher who made seminal contributions to understanding how scientific views are supported and discounted over time. The author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), an enormously influential work on the nature of scientific change, he was widely celebrated as the central figure in contemporary thought about how the scientific process evolves. In MIT's Commencement address in June, Vice President Albert Gore spoke of the relationship "between science and technology on the one hand and humankind and society on the other" and referred to "the great historian of science, Thomas Kuhn." Before Professor Kuhn's work, scientific evolution was commonly understood as the patient and progressive accumulation of knowledge about the world. In Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Professor Kuhn rejected this understanding in favor of an historical and social conception, based on a distinction between normal and revolutionary science. Normal science-the dominant enterprise-is puzzle-solving: scientists solve problems within settled frameworks of inquiry that are not themselves tested but simply taken for granted. They model their solutions on scientific paradigms-the exemplary solutions to once-outstanding puzzles that scientists master as part of their training (for example, Newton's derivation of planetary orbits from his laws of motion). In revolutionary periods (for example, the overthrow of Newtonian by relativist mechanics), Professor Kuhn said, unsolved puzzles or anomalies accumulate, and some scientists propose alternative frameworks of inquiry, often profoundly discontinuous with earlier views. Revolutions succeed when a new, incommensurably different outlook is better able to handle the previously unsolved anomalies and win the allegiance of younger scientists. In Kuhn's vision, then, science is not a smooth evolution of human knowledge, but an historical process in which periods of relative calm are punctuated by dramatic breaks in understanding. From 1982 to 1991, when he retired, Dr. Kuhn was the first Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor in Philosophy at MIT. Jed Z. Buchwald, the Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and director of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, said Professor Kuhn "was the most influential historian and philosopher of science of our time. He instructed and inspired his students and colleagues at Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton and MIT, as well as the tens of thousands of scholars and students in his own and other fields of social science and the humanities who read his works." Professor Kuhn joined MIT in 1979 from Princeton University, where he had been the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of the History of Science and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. At MIT, his work centered on cognitive and linguistic processes that bear on the philosophy of science, including the influence of language on the development of science. Born in Cincinnati in 1922, Professor Kuhn studied physics at Harvard, where he received the SB (1943), AM (1946) and PhD (1949). He taught at Harvard and at the University of California at Berkeley before joining Princeton in 1964. From 1978 to 1979 he was a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities. His honors included the Howard T. Behrman Award for distinguished achievements in the humanities (1977), the History of Science Society's George Sarton Medal (1982) and the Society for Social Studies of Science's John Desmond Bernal Award (1983). He became a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and was given honorary degrees by several universities throughout the world. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Philosophy of Science Association (president, 1988-90), and the History of Science Society (president, 1968-70). Professor Kuhn is survived by his wife, Jehane R. Kuhn; two daughters, Sarah Kuhn of Framingham and Elizabeth Kuhn of Los Angles; a son, Nathaniel S. Kuhn of Arlington; a brother, Roger S. Kuhn of Bethesda; and four grandchildren, Emma Kuhn LaChance, Samuel Kuhn LaChance, Gabrielle Gui-Ying Kuhn and Benjamin Simon Kuhn. He previously was married to Kathryn Muhs of Princeton, NJ, who is the mother of his children. Contributions in his memory may be made to Hospice of Cambridge and mailed to 245 Winter St., Waltham, 02154.
7992	dbpedia	0	68	https://www.monumentsmenandwomenfnd.org/kuhn-lt-cdr-charles-l-usnr	en	Kuhn, Lt. Cdr. Charles L., USNR	https://static.wixstatic…b53c2a%7Emv2.png	https://static.wixstatic…b53c2a%7Emv2.png	[ "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/b39bbe_5d26f9a0dbdc457cade8b32b09075e85~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_360,h_95,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/mmf-logo_retina.png", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/b39bbe_7f1ba2fb755c4f01938850a0213cc0e6~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_163,h_180,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/MMWF%20Dark%20Background%20(Green%20Box).png", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/b39bbe_46f47b4fd1ee4ad987cf9d8d703dfaac~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_190,h_240,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/Charles-Kuhn-1942.jpg", "https://static.wixstatic.com/media/b39bbe_204ee289620c451aad5e8776b5e2ac1c~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_127,h_140,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/White%20Transparent%20Background%20Green%20Box.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	The biography of Lt. Cdr. Charles L. Kuhn, USNR, member of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) section.	en	https://static.wixstatic…b53c2a%7Emv2.png	MonumentsMenWomenFnd	https://www.monumentsmenandwomenfnd.org/kuhn-lt-cdr-charles-l-usnr	Professor, museum director, and scholar of German art, Charles Louis Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on December 14, 1901. After an early education at military school, he received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan in 1923. He then continued his studies at Harvard University, where he earned a Master’s degree in 1924 and a Ph.D. in Fine Arts in 1929. Kuhn would remain at Harvard as a beloved professor, scholar and promoter of the arts for the rest of his career. He served as professor in the art department from 1931 to 1968 and Chairman of the Department of Fine Arts from 1949 to 1953. In 1930 Kuhn was named director of the Busch-Reisinger Museum (the Germanic Museum) at Harvard, a museum dedicated to the study of German art. Under Kuhn’s leadership, the museum grew to house one of the finest collections of modern art from central and northern Europe, including notable works of art from the Bauhaus, the Viennese Secession, and German Expressionism. In the 1930s, he began acquiring pieces that Hitler had deemed “degenerate” and had thus been removed from German museums including Max Beckmann’s Self Portrait in Tuxedo and E.L. Kirchner’s Self Portrait with a Cat. In 1937, Walter Gropius, German founder of the Bauhaus School, arrived at Harvard to become head of the architecture program. Together, Gropius and Kuhn built an outstanding Bauhaus collection at the Busch-Reisinger, gaining the support of other Bauhaus artists and architects exiled from Europe and living in the United States. Because of Kuhn’s contribution to the museum, a colleague later remarked that “To put it simply, Harvard has the most distinguished collection of German art in America, and a collection of German art of the twentieth century that is considered outstanding even in Germany.” In 1942 Kuhn entered the U.S. Naval Reserve and was assigned as a Navy Intelligence officer. For two years, he interrogated German prisoners. Due to his extensive knowledge of German art and culture, he was highly desired by the Roberts Commission for assignment with the MFAA. However, he was so effective as a Naval interrogator that he was released from his post only after direct intervention from officials in Washington. In March 1945 he was named Deputy Chief of the MFAA Section under British Monuments Man Lt. Col. Geoffrey Webb. He was stationed at SHAEF headquarters at Versailles and later in Frankfurt, Germany. At headquarters, Webb and Kuhn coordinated the operations of Monuments Men in the field as well as managing submitted field reports and planning future MFAA operations. In addition to his administrative duties, Kuhn traveled across the American Zone of Occupation in pursuit of looted works of art and cultural objects. In Summer 1945 he was responsible for the rescue of two trucks filled with paintings by Brueghel, Titian, and Velázquez, and tapestries belonging to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, which had been stolen by the Nazis from their hiding place in the Lauffen salt mine. He was also involved in the transport of artworks belonging to the Berlin Museums, including the famous Egyptian sculpted bust of Queen Nefertiti. Together with Monuments Men Lt. Col. Mason Hammond, Lt. Cdr. Thomas C. Howe, and Lt. Col. John Nicholas Brown, Kuhn helped arrange the transfer of the Berlin collections from the Merkers mine to the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point after temporary storage at the Reichsbank in Frankfurt. He also conferred with Monuments Man Lt. Col. Ernest DeWald, Chief of the MFAA Section at the headquarters of U.S. Forces, Austria (USFA) regarding the evacuation of the vast salt mine at Altaussee, Austria. Although he himself did not sign the Wiesbaden Manifesto (an internal protest by 32 MFAA Officers regarding the shipment of 202 German-owned paintings from the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. for safekeeping), he strongly agreed with the sentiments of his colleagues. In the January 1946 issue of College Art Journal, he published the text of his colleagues’ protest, accompanied by an article in which he spoke out against the transfer. He further argued that the paintings’ removal was unwarranted due to the extraordinary level of care given to works of art under the care of the MFAA at the various collecting points. Kuhn returned to the United States in October 1945 and resumed his post at Harvard. A prolific scholar, he published numerous works including A Catalogue of German Paintings of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in American Collections (1936), German Expressionist and Abstract Art, the Harvard Collections (1957), German and Netherlandish Sculpture, 1280-1800, the Harvard Collections (1965), and served as the editor of Art Journal from 1948-1950. Kuhn retired from Harvard as Professor Emeritus in 1968. In recognition for his contributions to the study of Germanic art, he was awarded the Order of Knighthood of the Northern Star by the Swedish Government in 1955 and the Order of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1959. Beloved by his colleagues and students, Charles Kuhn died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 21, 1985 after a long illness. Photo courtesy of the Kuhn Family (private collection).
7992	dbpedia	1	24	https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn.html	en	Thomas Kuhn			[ "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/extensions/FlaggedRevs/client/img/2.png", "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/extensions/FlaggedRevs/client/img/arrow-down.png", "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/images/thumb/Information.svg/20px-Information.svg.png", "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/skins/vector/images/search-ltr34ed.png?301", "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/skins/common/images/poweredby_mediawiki_88x31.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	../favicon.html		null	From Knowino Jump to: navigation, search Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1921 – June 22, 1996) was an American philosopher and historian of science. His most famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, revolutionized the philosophy of science and has become one of the most cited academic books of all time. His contribution to the philosophy of science marked a break with key positivist doctrines and began a new style of philosophy of science that brought it much closer to the history of science. The general thrust of his book is that science operates on the model of paradigms which are clung to until a scientific revolution or paradigm shift happens. As examples, he used the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, as well as the shift from pre-Darwinian to post-Darwinian biology. "... while Kuhn thus opened up the entire domain of science for political analysis, he argued that the behaviorally visible mark of a truly scientific community was its high degree of autonomy, its ability to exercise authority over its own intellectual affairs. He confirmed the instinct that science was really different. But he also showed that scientists, within their domain, behaved very much like the rest of us." – David Hollinger, writing in the New York Times.[1] [edit] Kuhn's life and career Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He was awarded a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943 graduating summa cum laude, and spent the remaining war years at Harvard researching into radar. He gained a master's degree in 1946, and a PhD in physics in 1949 for a thesis concerned an application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics. From 1948 until 1956 he taught a course in the history of science at Harvard, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department. There, he wrote and published (in 1962), at the age of forty, his major work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Most of his subsequent career was spent in articulating and developing the ideas developed within it. In 1964 he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1978 he published Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 and in 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In 1982 he was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. In 1994 he was diagnosed with cancer of the bronchial tubes; he died in 1996.[2] [edit] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions For more information, see: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (book). [edit] Notes ↑ Paradigms Lost, David Hollinger, writing in the New York Times, May 28, 2000 ↑ Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm The New York Times, June 19, 1996, Obituary By Lawrence Van Gelder; Fullmer JZ (1998) Memorial. Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)Technology and Culture 139:372-7
7992	dbpedia	1	73	https://www.astrotheme.com/astrology/Thomas_Kuhn	en	Astrology and natal chart of Thomas Kuhn, born on 1922	https://cdn.astrotheme.c…avicon-32x32.png	https://cdn.astrotheme.c…avicon-32x32.png	[ "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/logo-407-79.gif", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/accueil.gif", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/facebook.gif", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/x.gif", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/rss.gif", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/en.gif", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/fr.gif", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/buttons/account.png", "https://www.astrotheme.com/now.svg?m=28732999", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/lune/13.png", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/lune/pl.png", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/aFavoris.png", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/rFavoris.png", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/comparaison.png", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/chart/can.gif", 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"https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/poseido.gif", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/developper.gif", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/proserp.gif", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/partage_Z_2.png", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/partage_E_2.png", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/imprimer.png", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/reports/41.png", "https://www.astrotheme.com/images/diagramme.id.output.php?id=4", "https://www.astrotheme.com/images/diagramme.id.output.php?id=5", "https://www.astrotheme.com/images/diagramme.id.output.php?id=9", "https://www.astrotheme.com/images/diagramme.id.output.php?id=10", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/pdf/n3.jpg", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/p25.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "Thomas Kuhn horoscope", "Thomas Kuhn astrology" ]	null	[]	null	Horoscope and natal chart of Thomas Kuhn, born on 1922/07/18: you will find in this page an excerpt of the astrological portrait and the interpration of the planetary dominants.	en	https://cdn.astrotheme.c…e-touch-icon.png		https://www.astrotheme.com/astrology/Thomas_Kuhn	Horoscope and chart of Thomas Kuhn Astrological portrait of Thomas Kuhn (excerpt) Disclaimer: these short excerpts of astrological charts are computer processed. They are, by no means, of a personal nature. This principle is valid for the 68,676 celebrities included in our database. These texts provide the meanings of planets, or combination of planets, in signs and in houses, as well as the interpretations of planetary dominants in line with modern Western astrology rules. Moreover, since Astrotheme is not a polemic website, no negative aspect which may damage the good reputation of a celebrity is posted here, unlike in the comprehensive astrological portrait. Introduction Here are some character traits from Thomas Kuhn's birth chart. This description is far from being comprehensive but it can shed light on his/her personality, which is still interesting for professional astrologers or astrology lovers. In a matter of minutes, you can get at your email address your astrological portrait (approximately 32 pages), a much more comprehensive report than this portrait of Thomas Kuhn. N.B.: as this celebrity's birth time is unknown, the chart is arbitrarily calculated for 12:00 PM - the legal time for his/her place of birth; since astrological houses are not taken into account, this astrological profile excerpt is less detailed than those for which the birth time is known. The dominant planets of Thomas Kuhn When interpreting a natal chart, the best method is to start gradually from general features to specific ones. Thus, there is usually a plan to be followed, from the overall analysis of the chart and its structure, to the description of its different character traits. In the first part, an overall analysis of the chart enables us to figure out the personality's main features and to emphasize several points that are confirmed or not in the detailed analysis: in any case, those general traits are taken into account. Human personality is an infinitely intricate entity and describing it is a complex task. Claiming to rapidly summarize it is illusory, although it does not mean that it is an impossible challenge. It is essential to read a natal chart several times in order to absorb all its different meanings and to grasp all this complexity. But the exercise is worthwhile. In brief, a natal chart is composed of ten planets: two luminaries, the Sun and the Moon, three fast-moving or individual planets, Mercury, Venus and Mars, two slow-moving planets, Jupiter and Saturn, and three very slow-moving planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Additional secondary elements are: the Lunar Nodes, the Dark Moon or Lilith, Chiron and other minor objects. They are all posited on the Zodiac wheel consisting of twelve signs, from Aries to Pisces, and divided into twelve astrological houses. The first step is to evaluate the importance of each planet. This is what we call identifying the dominant planets. This process obeys rules that depend on the astrologer's sensitivity and experience but it also has precise and steady bases: thus, we can take into account the parameters of a planet's activity (the number of active aspects a planet forms, the importance of each aspect according to its nature and its exactness), angularity parameters; (proximity to the four angles, Ascendant, Midheaven, Descendant and Imum Coeli or Nadir, all of them being evaluated numerically, according to the kind of angle and the planet-angle distance) and quality parameters (rulership, exaltation, exile and fall). Finally, other criteria such as the rulership of the Ascendant and the Midheaven etc. are important. These different criteria allow a planet to be highlighted and lead to useful conclusions when interpreting the chart. The overall chart analysis begins with the observation of three sorts of planetary distributions in the chart: Eastern or Western hemisphere, Northern or Southern hemisphere, and quadrants (North-eastern, North-western, South-eastern and South-western). These three distributions give a general tone in terms of introversion and extraversion, willpower, sociability, and behavioural predispositions. Then, there are three additional distributions: elements (called triplicity since there are three groups of signs for each one) - Fire, Air, Earth and Water - corresponding to a character typology, modality (or quadruplicity with four groups of signs for each one) - Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable - and polarity (Yin and Yang). There are three types of dominants: dominant planets, dominant signs and dominant houses. The novice thinks astrology means only "to be Aries" or sometimes, for example, "to be Aries Ascendant Virgo". It is actually far more complex. Although the Sun and the Ascendant alone may reveal a large part of the character - approximately a third or a half of your psychological signature, a person is neither "just the Sun" (called the sign) nor just "the first house" (the Ascendant). Thus, a particular planet's influence may be significantly increased; a particular sign or house may contain a group of planets that will bring nuances and sometimes weaken the role of the Ascendant, of the Sun sign etc. Lastly, there are two other criteria: accentuations (angular, succedent and cadent) which are a classification of astrological houses and types of decanates that are occupied (each sign is divided into three decanates of ten degrees each). They provide some additional informations. These general character traits must not be taken literally; they are, somehow, preparing for the chart reading. They allow to understand the second part of the analysis, which is more detailed and precise. It focuses on every area of the personality and provides a synthesis of all the above-mentioned parameters according to sound hierarchical rules. Warning: when the birth time is unknown, which is the case for Thomas Kuhn, a few paragraphs become irrelevant; distributions in hemispheres and quadrants are meaningless, so are dominant houses and houses' accentuations. Therefore, some chapters are removed from this part. For all paragraphs, the criteria for valuation are calculated without taking into account angles and rulerships of the Ascendant and of the Midheaven. The methodology retains its validity, but it is less precise without a time of birth. Elements and Modes for Thomas Kuhn The predominance of Water signs indicates high sensitivity and elevation through feelings, Thomas Kuhn. Your heart and your emotions are your driving forces, and you can't do anything on Earth if you don't feel a strong affective charge (as a matter of fact, the word "feeling" is essential in your psychology). You need to love in order to understand, and to feel in order to take action, which causes a certain vulnerability which you should fight against. Like the majority of Earth signs, Thomas Kuhn, you are efficient, concrete and not too emotional. What matters to you is what you see: you judge the tree by its fruits. Your ideas keep changing, words disappear, but actions and their consequences are visible and remain. Express your sensitivity, even if it means revealing your vulnerability. Emotions, energy and communication must not be neglected; concrete action is meaningless if it is not justified by your heart, your intellect or your enthusiasm. The twelve zodiacal signs are split up into three groups or modes, called quadruplicities, a learned word meaning only that these three groups include four signs. The Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable modes are more or less represented in your natal chart, depending on planets' positions and importance, and on angles in the twelve signs. Thomas Kuhn, the Cardinal mode is dominant here and indicates a predisposition to action, and more exactly, to impulsion and to undertake: you are very keen to implement the plans you have in mind, to get things going and to create them. This is the most important aspect that inspires enthusiasm and adrenalin in you, without which you can grow weary rapidly. You are individualistic (maybe too much?) and assertive. You let others strengthen and improve the constructions which you built with fervour. Dominants: Planets, Signs and Houses for Thomas Kuhn The issue of dominant planets has existed since the mists of time in astrology: how nice it would be if a person could be described with a few words and one or several planets that would represent their character, without having to analyse such elements as rulerships, angularities, houses, etc! The ten planets - the Sun throughout Pluto - are a bit like ten characters in a role-play, each one has its own personality, its own way of acting, its own strengths and weaknesses. They actually represent a classification into ten distinct personalities, and astrologers have always tried to associate one or several dominant planets to a natal chart as well as dominant signs and houses. Indeed, it is quite the same situation with signs and houses. If planets symbolize characters, signs represent hues - the mental, emotional and physical structures of an individual. The sign in which a planet is posited is like a character whose features are modified according to the place where he lives. In a chart, there are usually one, two or three highlighted signs that allow to rapidly describe its owner. Regarding astrological houses, the principle is even simpler: the twelve houses correspond to twelve fields of life, and planets tenanting any given house increase that house's importance and highlight all relevant life departments: it may be marriage, work, friendship etc. In your natal chart, Thomas Kuhn, the ten main planets are distributed as follows: The three most important planets in your chart are the Moon, Pluto and Uranus. The Moon is one of the most important planets in your chart and endows you with a receptive, emotive, and imaginative nature. You have an innate ability to instinctively absorb atmospheres and impressions that nurture you, and as a result, you are often dreaming your life away rather than actually living it. One of the consequences of your spontaneity may turn into popularity, or even fame: the crowd is a living and complex entity, and it always appreciates truth and sincerity rather than calculation and total self-control. As a Lunar character, you find it difficult to control yourself, you have to deal with your moods, and you must be careful not to stay passive in front of events: nothing is handed on a plate, and although your sensitivity is rich, even richer than most people's, you must make a move and spare some of your energy for... action! With Pluto as a dominant planet in your chart, you are a magnetic and mighty predator, like the Scorpio sign ruled by this planet, who needs to exert pressure on others in order to "test" them. You are always ready to evolve, to risk destruction for reconstruction - including your own - to live more intensely whilst imposing your secret authority on things and on people you encounter. You may come across as wicked, cruel or too authoritarian, but actually you only follow your instinct, you sound people out, and you like to exert your domination simply because your vital energy is too powerful to remain inside. You are inclined to be passionate, with hidden motivations. You are sometimes misunderstood but one of your great Plutonian assets is to go successfully through each life ordeal with ever growing strength. Uranus is among your dominant planets: just like Neptune and Pluto, Uranian typology is less clearly defined than the so-called classical seven planets that are visible to the naked eye, from the Sun to Saturn. However, it is possible to associate your Uranian nature with a few clear characteristics: Uranus rhymes with independence, freedom, originality, or even rebelliousness and marginality, when things go wrong... Uranus is Mercury's higher octave and as such, he borrows some of its traits of character; namely, a tendency to intellectualize situations and emotions with affective detachment, or at least jagged affectivity. Therefore, you are certainly a passionate man who is on the lookout for any kind of action or revolutionary idea, and you are keen on new things. Uranians are never predictable, and it is especially when they are believed to be stable and well settled that... they change everything - their life, partner, and job! In fact, you are allergic to any kind of routine, although avoiding it must give way to many risks. In your natal chart, the three most important signs - according to criteria mentioned above - are in decreasing order of strength Cancer, Taurus and Libra. In general, these signs are important because your Ascendant or your Sun is located there. But this is not always the case: there may be a cluster of planets, or a planet may be near an angle other than the Midheaven or Ascendant. It may also be because two or three planets are considered to be very active because they form numerous aspects from these signs. Thus, you display some of the three signs' characteristics, a bit like a superposition of features on the rest of your chart, and it is all the more so if the sign is emphasized. Cancer is one of your dominant signs and endows you with imagination and exceptionally shrewd sensitivity. Although suspicious at first sight - and even at second...- as soon as you get familiar with people and let them win your confidence, your golden heart eventually shows up, despite your discretion and your desire for security that make you return into your shell at the slightest alert! Actually, you are a poet and if you are sometimes blamed for your nostalgia and your laziness, it is because your intense inner life is at full throttle... With the Taurus sign so important in your chart, you are constructive, stable, and sensual. Good taste, sense of beauty, manners, and unfailing good sense - all these qualities contribute to your charm and seductive power. Furthermore, if some people criticize your slow pace and your stubbornness, you rightly reply that this is the price for your security, and that you like the way it is - slow and steady.... With Libra as a dominant sign in your natal chart, you love to please, to charm, and to be likeable. Moreover, you are naturally inclined towards tolerance and moderation, as well as elegance and tact, as if you were meant to please! Of course, you always find malcontents who criticize your lack of authenticity or of courage and your half-heartedness, but your aim is to be liked, and in this field, you are an unrivalled champion! After this paragraph about dominant planets, of Thomas Kuhn, here are the character traits that you must read more carefully than the previous texts since they are very specific: the texts about dominant planets only give background information about the personality and remain quite general: they emphasize or, on the contrary, mitigate different particularities or facets of a personality. A human being is a complex whole and only bodies of texts can attempt to successfully figure out all the finer points. The Moon in Taurus: his sensitivity You love nature as much as your comfort, Thomas Kuhn, you are an Epicurean willing to enjoy life's beautiful and good things within the family clan or with friends who value your conviviality and your kindness. You are faithful, stable, with your feet rooted in the ground and you are reliable in all circumstances. You are attached to your affective and material security. You tend to be jealous and possessive and, although your nature is quite slow, you may be short-tempered and aggressive when you feel threatened. In such cases, you display an exceptional stubbornness and fury and it becomes impossible to make you change your mind. Although you are aware that your behaviour is wrong, you stick to your line and your grudge is persistent. However, you are so sensitive to tenderness and to concrete gestures of affection that a few presents or a few caresses are enough to make you see life through rose-coloured glasses again... Mercury in Cancer: his intellect and social life Your intelligence is sensitive and delicate, with good comprehension abilities, Thomas Kuhn, which endows you with a strong intuition and receptivity. To you, impressions and feelings prevail over facts and your excellent selective memory is not cluttered with useless elements. Although you are not aware, your fertile imagination may lead you to change your daily reality so that it matches your dreams better. If you are creative, you may make use of your imagination in literary pursuits where you can freely invent beautiful stories taking place in the past. Your passion for History is such that you may immerse yourself into it with too much nostalgia and therefore, you may miss opportunities the present offers to design projects and to think of the future. Venus in Virgo and the Sun in Cancer: his affectivity and seductiveness In your chart, the Sun is in Cancer and Venus, in Virgo. Modesty and moderation: they are the dominant characteristics of the Cancer-Virgo duet, according to the Tradition. You are not the most extroverted person in the world and it is hard for you to declare your love or to express your passion. It might be due to a form of shyness, a desire to protect yourself and to prevent people from upsetting your fragile affective balance. Regardless of the intensity of your love, your partner must not expect staggering declarations, but an unfailing faithfulness, a real dedication motivated by the desire to build a privileged, isolated and treasured relationship. It is likely that tenderness is the key to your affective fulfilment. Without tenderness, there can be no deep-seated balance. In the long run, you cannot be satisfied with budding flashes of passion and with a relationship solely based on heart tumults. The real adventure begins when the wild excitements of the early stages fade away, when you have nothing to prove to yourself and when mutual confidence allows for a life together, despite the inevitable differences between you and your partner. You probably belong to that category of lover for whom time is an asset rather than an enemy. An ally needed for the full blossoming of your relationship. Thomas Kuhn, inside yourself, feelings are strong and powerful. However, you never show them before weighing up and considering all the possible consequences of your words and your actions: fieriness and spontaneousness are toned down because you cannot help controlling yourself, probably due to your modesty, your discretion or your shyness; you are frightened because you are so concerned with other people's opinion that you see passion, or expressing your feelings too quickly, as sources of danger. However, you are helpful, simple, and you do not fuss around. Reason prevails in your love life but your heart may flare up when the context is well organized and everyday life is cautiously handled with good sense, tidiness and cleanliness. Your sensitivity prompts you to avoid excesses and outbursts and this is how you think that you can achieve happiness without risk. The Sun in Cancer: his will and inner motivations Psychologically speaking, your nature is dreamy, oriented towards nostalgia for things past. You are very instinctive and you protect yourself against the outside world. Your inner life is rich, with fertile and even unlimited imagination, a propensity to avoid unnecessary risks and to pursue security. You show your true face only to persons you can trust, when there is a kind of well being triggered by the nostalgia for the past. As you are born under this sign, you are emotional, sentimental, restful, imaginative, sensitive, loyal, enduring, protective, vulnerable, generous, romantic, tender, poetic, maternal, dreamy, indolent, greedy and dedicated. You may also be fearful, unrealistic, evasive, passive, touchy, anxious, dependent, stubborn, lunatic, backward-looking, lazy, burdensome, impenetrable and a homebody. Love in the masculine mode: for you, Sir, in love, you are tender, sensitive and quite loyal. You are influenced by a mother-figure and you unconsciously look for a partner who will offer as much attention and affection as you used to receive as a child. You are a homebody and a dreamer and you blossom in the family cocoon you create, dreaming of adventures and extraordinary trips that you most often take in your head. Tenderness is more important than sexuality, even though it is also an agent for security and for stability. You tremendously appreciate to be again the spoiled child that you used to be, as you savour tasty little dishes or as you receive the frequent praises you need in order to feel reassured. You are sheltered from tragedies and life complications because at the very moment when a difficult situation emerges, you nip it in the bud either by ignoring it or by withdrawing into your shell quietly, until the storm subsides. Your home is happy and rich, quiet and harmonious, throughout your life. Mars in Sagittarius: his ability to take action Thomas Kuhn, you are a real Goliath and you often excel in sport; your thirst for conquests prompts you to constantly launch new challenges. The enthusiasm you put in your undertakings is perfectly well supported by your moral concepts and an idealism compatible with the values of the society you live in. You are pragmatic, enterprising and sometimes, naive. You do not pay attention to details and you launch various great adventurous projects that are all doomed to success. In a few rare cases, you can funnel your huge energy into more philosophical, even spiritual or religious enterprises, where your entire fieriness works wonders. On the sexual plane, your ardour and your spontaneity are your main assets. The danger is that you may spread yourself too thin in the sense that you may forget about faithfulness, particularly during the extensive faraway travels you are so fond of. Conclusion This text is only an excerpt from of Thomas Kuhn's portrait. If you want to get your own astrological portrait, much more comprehensive that this present excerpt, you can order it at this page. Do you belong to the Jupiterian type, benevolent and generous? The Martian type, active and a go-getter? The Venusian type, charming and seductive? The Lunar type, imaginative and sensitive? The Solar type, noble and charismatic? The Uranian type, original, uncompromising and a freedom-lover? The Plutonian type, domineering and secretive? The Mercurian type, cerebral, inquiring and quick? The Neptunian type, visionary, capable of empathy and impressionable? The Saturnian type, profound, persevering and responsible? Are you more of the Fire type, energetic and intuitive? The Water type, sentimental and receptive? The Earth type, realistic and efficient? Or the Air type, gifted in communication and highly intellectual? 11 planetary dominants and 57 characteristics are reviewed, quantified, and interpreted; then, your psychological portrait is described in detail, in a comprehensive document of approximately 32-36 pages, full of engrossing and original pieces of information about yourself. Astrological reports describe many of the character traits and they sometimes go deeper into the understanding of a personality. Please, always keep in mind that human beings are continuously evolving and that many parts of our psychological structures are likely to be expressed later, after having undergone significant life's experiences. It is advised to read a portrait with hindsight in order to appreciate its astrological content. Under this condition, you will be able to take full advantage of this type of study. The analysis of an astrological portrait consists in understanding four types of elements which interact with one another: ten planets, twelve zodiacal signs, twelve houses, and what are called aspects between planets (the 11 aspects most commonly used are: conjunction, opposition, square, trine, sextile, quincunx, semi-sextile, sesqui-quadrate, quintile and bi-quintile. The first 5 aspects enumerated are called major aspects). Planets represent typologies of our human psychology: sensitivity, affectivity, ability to undertake, will-power, mental process, aptitude, and taste for communication etc., all independent character facets are divided here for practical reasons. The twelve signs forming the space where planets move will "colour", so to speak, these typologies with each planet being located in its particular sign. They will then enrich the quality of these typologies, as expressed by the planets. The Zodiac is also divided into twelve astrological houses. This makes sense only if the birth time is known because within a few minutes, the twelve houses (including the 1st one, the Ascendant) change significantly. They correspond to twelve specific spheres of life: external behaviour, material, social and family life, relationship, home, love life, daily work, partnership, etc. Each planet located in any given house will then act according to the meaning of its house, and a second colouration again enriches those active forces that the planets symbolize. Finally, relations will settle among planets, creating a third structure, which completes the planets' basic meanings. A set of ancient rules, which has stood the test of experience over hundreds of years (although astrology is in evolution, only reliable elements are integrated into classical studies), are applied to organize the whole chart into a hierarchy and to allow your personality to be interpreted by texts. The planets usually analysed are the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, which means two luminaries (the Sun and the Moon) and 8 planets, a total of 10 planets. Additional secondary elements may be taken into account, such as asteroids Chiron, Vesta, Pallas, Ceres (especially Chiron, more well-known), the Lunar nodes, the Dark Moon or Lilith, and even other bodies: astrology is a discipline on the move. Astrological studies, including astrological portrait, compatibility of couples, predictive work, and horoscopes evolve and become more accurate or deeper, as time goes by. Precision: concerning the horoscopes with a known time of birth, according to the Tradition, we consider that a planet near the beginning (called cuspide) of the next house (less than 2 degrees for the Ascendant and the Midheaven, and less than 1 degree for all other houses) belongs to this house: our texts and dominants take this rule into account. You can also choose not to take this shift into account in the form, and also tick the option Koch or Equal houses system instead of Placidus, the default houses system. Warning: In order to avoid any confusion and any possible controversy, we want to draw your attention upon the fact that this sample of celebrities is very complete and therefore, it also includes undesirable people, since every category is represented: beside artists, musicians, politicians, lawyers, professional soldiers, poets, writers, singers, explorers, scientists, academics, religious figures, saints, philosophers, sages, astrologers, mediums, sportsmen, chess champions, famous victims, historical characters, members of royal families, models, painters, sculptors, and comics authors or other actual celebrities, there are also famous murderers, tyrants and dictators, serial-killers, or other characters whose image is very negative, often rightly so. Regarding the latter, it must be remembered that even a monster or at least a person who perpetrated odious crimes, has some human qualities, often noticed by his/her close entourage: these excerpts come from computer programmes devoid of polemical intentions and may seem too soft or lenient. The positive side of each personality is deliberately stressed. Negative sides have been erased here - it is not the same in our comprehensive reports on sale - because it could hurt the families of such people. We are hoping that it will not rebound on the victims' side. Numerology: Birth Path of Thomas Kuhn Testimonies to numerology are found in the most ancient civilizations and show that numerology pre-dates astrology. This discipline considers the name, the surname, and the date of birth, and ascribes a meaning to alphabetic letters according to the numbers which symbolise them. The path of life, based on the date of birth, provides indications on the kind of destiny which one is meant to experience. It is one of the elements that must reckoned with, along with the expression number, the active number, the intimacy number, the achievement number, the hereditary number, the dominant numbers or the lacking numbers, or also the area of expression, etc. Your Life Path is influenced by the number 3, which highlights communication and creativity, and indicates that ideas and personal realisations are the important features of your destiny. This number is related to altruism, harmony, the capacity to take initiatives, and the gift for passing on all kinds of knowledge and information. So, you are a person of communication, and your concern is to disseminate your ideas and your beliefs, as well as to discover other approaches and schools of thoughts. In a word, you are open to the world! You express yourself better when you are in situations which allow a great deal of personal initiatives. Then, your inventiveness works wonders. On the other hand, you find it hard to fulfil repetitive tasks and to accept the monotony of a life devoid of surprise. Your creativity is as strong as your need for freedom, and people often envy you because, even though you may encounter a few hurdles, your ingenuity enables you to merrily grow on your path. Thomas Kuhn was born under the sign of the Dog, element Water Chinese astrology is brought to us as a legacy of age-old wisdom and invites us to develop an awareness of our inner potential. It is believed that the wise man is not subjected to stellar influences. However, we must gain the lucidity and the distance without which we remain locked up in an implacable destiny. According to the legend of the Circle of Animals, Buddha summoned all the animals to bid them farewell before he left our world. Only twelve species answered Buddha's call. They form the Chinese Zodiac and symbolize the twelve paths of wisdom that are still valid nowadays. The Asian wise man considers that a path is neither good nor bad. One can and must develop one's potentialities. The first step is to thoroughly know oneself. You belong to the category of reliable people, true to their principles as well as loyal to their friends. You try to organize your life settings. If you are not concerned with the disorder that is external to your private sphere, everything related to your personality and your environment must be in order. Therefore, you are a perfectionist by nature, but you are also anxious and meticulous to an exaggerate point: you enjoy discussing details, analyzing and criticizing everything. Your concern is to keep your realm under control, which implies a fair amount of modesty and some distance. The Dog is aware of his limits and he prefers to stick to what he masters rather than being tempted by some exceedingly adventurous conquest. But the capacity to control your realm constitutes an obvious asset, an extraordinary driving force favouring your evolution. As one contents oneself with doing well in the field which one thoroughly masters, one can go far, very far... Methodically - sometimes with your own method - you allow the dust to settle, you purify, using a process of elimination, until the essentials only remain. You may be lacking ambition. It does not matter! You leave panache and veneer to other people and you take up challenges in your unique way, with discretion, moderation, modesty or reserve. Chinese astrology has five elements, which are referred to as agents: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. You have a deep affinity with the agent Water. In China, this element corresponds to the planet Mercury, the black colour and the number 6. You are particularly sensitive to your surroundings, the atmosphere of a place and the climate of a meeting. Your high receptivity allows you to perceive naturally the stakes underlying people and situations. You are reserved by nature, you favour emotions and inner life, leaving challenges and audacity to other people. You frequently maintain a certain distance and you share your true feelings with few intimate friends only. It is probably because you know that genuine communication is a difficult exercise. Everything in your realm is sheer subtlety and nuance. The danger is that you may escape realities and indulge in indolence without fulfilling your responsibilities. This is the other side of the coin of your extraordinary sensitivity and your exceptional clear-sightedness. You feel in tune with few people. However, this selectivity forges relationships that are long-lasting because they are natural and genuine. N. B.: when the birth time is unknown, (12:00 PM (unknown)), these portrait excerpts do not take into account the parameters derived from the time, which means, the domification (Ascendant, astrological houses, etc.). Nonetheless, these analyses remain accurate in any case. Regarding the sources of the birth data in our possession, kindly note that the pages we publish constitute a starting point for more detailed research, even though they seem useful to us. When the sources are contradictory, which occurs rarely, after having analysed them, we choose the most reliable one. Sometimes, we publish a birth date just because it is made available, but we do not claim that is it the best one, by no means.
7992	dbpedia	2	30	https://softschools.com/facts/scientists/thomas_kuhn_facts/1908/	en	Thomas Kuhn Facts			[ "https://softschools.com/images/logo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "Thomas Kuhn", "facts", "Thomas Kuhn facts", "Thomas Kuhn facts for kids", "fun facts about Thomas Kuhn" ]	null	[]	null	Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 to June 17, 1996) was an American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science. In 1962 he published his most famous book, <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i>, in which he popularized the term "paradigm shift."	en			null	Interesting Thomas Kuhn Facts: Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his father Samuel Kuhn was an industrial engineer. In 1940 he graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. In 1943 he earned a B.S. in physics from Harvard University. He earned his M.S. in 1946 and his PhD in 1949 at Harvard. Kuhn credits his three years as a Harvard Junior Fellow for his insight into the theory of scientific thought. From 1948 to 1956 he taught the history of science at Harvard. He transferred to University of California, Berkeley and taught in both the philosophy and history departments. Kuhn interviewed Niels Bohr just before Bohr's death. While he was at Berkeley he published The Structure of Scientific Thought. In it he introduced the controversial idea that the subjective worldview of the investigator influences and colors his scientific interpretation. He stated that the history of scientific progress is not linear but that it undergoes periodic revolutions in which a field of study is abruptly transformed. In 1964 he became the M.Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. From 1979 to 1991 he was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kuhn's work has had enormous impact in several fields. In the philosophy of science it expanded the vocabulary to encompass the everyday workings of science. In sociology, he is a force behind the post Mertonian Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. He work also influenced the Humanities and was used to distinguish between historical and scientific communities and between political and religious groups.
7992	dbpedia	0	29	https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/kuhn-thomas-s	en	Kuhn, Thomas S.			[ "https://www.encyclopedia.com/themes/custom/trustme/images/header-logo.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "KUHN", "THOMAS S.KUHN", "THOMAS S. (1922–1996)", "U.S. historian and philosopher of science. Born in Cincinnati", "Ohio", "Kuhn was educated at Harvard University", "earning his bachelor's degree in 1943", "his master's degree in physics in 1946", "and his Ph.D. in the history of science in 1949. He remained at Harvard as a junior fellow", "becoming an assistant professor of general education and the history of science in 1952." ]	null	[]	null	KUHN, THOMAS S.KUHN, THOMAS S. (1922–1996), U.S. historian and philosopher of science. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Kuhn was educated at Harvard University, earning his bachelor's degree in 1943, his master's degree in physics in 1946, and his Ph.D. in the history of science in 1949. He remained at Harvard as a junior fellow, becoming an assistant professor of general education and the history of science in 1952. Source for information on Kuhn, Thomas S.: Encyclopaedia Judaica dictionary.	en	/sites/default/files/favicon.ico		https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/kuhn-thomas-s	KUHN, THOMAS S. (1922–1996), U.S. historian and philosopher of science. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Kuhn was educated at Harvard University, earning his bachelor's degree in 1943, his master's degree in physics in 1946, and his Ph.D. in the history of science in 1949. He remained at Harvard as a junior fellow, becoming an assistant professor of general education and the history of science in 1952. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1956 to 1964, and at Princeton University from 1964 to 1979. Kuhn was named professor of the philosophy and history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979, becoming professor emeritus in 1984. Kuhn's first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), was a study of the development of the heliocentric theory of the solar system. His second work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), has become one of the most influential books in the philosophy of science, the social sciences, and the humanities. In this work, Kuhn argued against the conventional view of science as a gradual acquisition of knowledge, based on experimental data, which develops over time. Instead, Kuhn maintained that scientific theory has been defined by "paradigms," or worldviews, which consist of both theories and experimental methods. The acceptance of a paradigm by scientists influences all subsequent experimental work as scientists seek to refine its theories; the paradigm determines not only the type of experiments performed but also the interpretation of their results. Puzzling results are considered to result from flawed methodology. Eventually, however, an accumulation of difficult results and insoluble problems may cause a crisis that must be resolved by an intellectual revolution – in other words, by the creation of a new paradigm. Though initial reviews of the work were mixed, it was later considered to have revolutionized its field. Its influence has been considerable in areas beyond the history and philosophy of science, as Kuhn's concept of paradigm shifts was extended to political science, sociology, economics, and other fields. Kuhn received many honors during his lifetime. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954 and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science from 1958 to 1959. He served as director of the project Sources for the History of Quantum Physics, sponsored by the American Physical Society and the American Philosophical Society, from 1961 to 1964. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1972 to 1979. He received the Howard T. Behrman Award from Princeton in 1977, the George Sarton Medal from the History of Science Society in 1982, and the Bernal Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science in 1983.
7992	dbpedia	3	9	https://bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/PhilSci/Kuhn.html	en	Thomas Kuhn's Theory of Scientific Revolutions			[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null	Natural Phenomena, Science, and Philosophy of Science Kuhn's Model of Scientific Revolutions Some Philosophical Aspects of Kuhn's Theory Questions for Study Natural Phenomena, Science, and Philosophy of Science Now that we have looked at what is often referred to as the first major scientific revolution in modern history -- the cosmological revolution from Copernicus to Newton -- we will go on to look at philosophies of science that attempt to explain the historical dynamics of scientific revolutions. The process can be conceptualized, in a preliminary and somewhat simplistic way, as a three tiered one: Natural phenomena exist which we wish to study. (The extent to which natural phenomena exist independently of the observer is a major philosophical problem, especially in philosophy of quantum mechanics. But we will assume a fairly robust degree of independence to start with; this may be modified later as we reflect further). Natural scientists investigate these natural phenomena and develop theories that make predictions and can be tested against the reality which they attempt to describe, classify, and explain. (Again, a note of caution. It is easy -- and almost any high school textbook does so -- to invoke "the scientific method" as a nearly infallible means by which scientists develop their theories. But this is once again to oversimplify -- much of philosophy of science is devoted to demystifying this simplification, by showing the complex and varying approaches which science has taken to natural phenomena). Philosophers of science investigate the logical structure of scientific theories and the historical dynamics of their development, modifications, and even replacement (for example: the replacement of the geocentric cosmology with a heliocentric one which we have just examined). Philosophers of science (allied often enough, though not always, with historians of science), are therefore twice removed from the natural phenomena which are the subject matter of science. But at the same time, this "distance" allows them to adopt a more critical approach. Kuhn's Model of Scientific Revolutions Perhaps the best known philosopher of science in the last half century is Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), who was for many years a professor of philosophy and history of science at MIT. Kuhn, who died just a few years ago, held his PhD in physics, but was asked as a young faculty member to teach a course in history of science. He became fascinated with the process by which theories, once held to be true, were replaced by very different ones, also held to be true. For example, the view that all matter was made of Earth, Air, Water and Fire held sway for over two millenia; yet it now seems crude and even child-like in comparison to the modern theory of chemical elements. Nonetheless, it was held to be adequate for a much longer period of time. For Kuhn, the problem was two-fold: (i) to explain why scientific theories are accepted, and (ii) to explain why scientific theories are replaced. These two aspects are intimately related, and the key concept that Kuhn develops is that of "paradigm" -- a reigning or dominant approach to solving problems in a given area of science. Kuhn presented his views in Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first edition 1962, second edition 1970). He argued that scientific revolutions proceed through the following stages: "Normal Science", that is to say everyday, bread-and-butter science, is a "puzzle-solving" activity conducted under a reigning "paradigm". The paradigm is the example or model of a great scientific achievement (such as Newton's theory of gravity, or Einstein's theory of relativity) which provides an inspiration and a guide showing how to do scientific research. It is not quite an explicit set of rules and regulations (not a recipe or formula), but it does clearly "show the way". "Puzzle solving" is the normal or everyday activity of scientists, and consists of problems which are believed, in advance, to have a solution, if only enough ingenuity and effort is brought to bear, using the paradigm as a guide. An "anomaly" arises when a puzzle, considered as important or essential in some way, cannot be solved. The anomaly cannot be written off as just an ill-conceived research project; it continues to assert itself as a thorn in the side of the practicing scientists. The anomaly is a novelty that cannot be written off, and which cannot be solved. Examples of anomalies include: According to Newtonian mechanics, there should be a difference in the speed of light when it is issued from a moving source. Careful experiments in the late 19th century found no such difference, despite the most accurate of instruments. According to the Theory of the special creation of species, a divine being created each species separately and individually, perfectly adapted to its environment. The discovery of the fossil remains of species not corresponding to any existing species (extinct species) contradicted this key assumption of biology before Darwin. This opens up a period called the "crisis", during which time new methods and approaches are permitted, since the older ones have proved incapable of rising to the task at hand (solving the anomaly). Views and procedures previously considered heretical are temporarily permitted, in the hope of cracking the anomaly. One of these new approaches is successful, and it becomes the new paradigm through a "paradigm shift". This constitutes the core of the scientific revolution. The new paradigm is popularized in text-books, which serve as the instruction material for the next generation of scientists, who are brought up with the idea that the paradigm -- once new and revolutionary -- is just the way things are done. The novelty of the scientific revolution recedes and disappears, until the process is begun anew with another anomaly-crisis-paradigm shift. Some Philosophical Aspects of Kuhn's Theory Kuhn also has made a number of major philosophical claims in the context of developing his model of how science produces revolutions in theory. I mention them here in passing, as just the critical examination of these claims could be the subject of a whole course: (1) Scientists cannot by themselves "translate" between and old and a new paradigm; these paradigms are "incommensurable", and can be (partially) translated only with the aid of historians and philosophers of science. For example, the explanation for combustion before the oxygen theory invoked a substance, widely accepted in the 18th century, known as "phlogiston", which was given off when a material burned. The modern theory explains the same phenomena as due to the taking-in of oxygen, not the expulsion of the non-existent "phlogiston". A student of chemistry would need a specialist to translate the older theory into modern terms, and even then, aspects of it would remain somewhat mysterious, since taken out of their 18th century context where they made sense. (2) Scientists escape the dominant paradigm which forms, as it were, their "skin", inside of which they conduct their research. Consequently, there is no "higher authority" who can adjudicate, or decide once and for all, competing truth-claims. All we have are the paradigms of today (the context for on-going research) and those of the past (partially translated by historians and philosophers of science). Not only can there be no absolute truth (true once and for all), but Kuhn makes the more radical claim that the concept of "truth" can be dispensed with entirely, replaced by that of "successful problem solving within a paradigm". Similarly, "objectivity" as a notion independent of the inquiring scientist has no meaning, and is replaced by the methods adopted as standard within the community of scientists. (3) Kuhn believed, however, that science progresses over time. This is not, however, a question of approaching or achieving "the truth" (see (2) above),. but a matter of solving more problems under the current paradigm than under past ones. (Some old problems drop out as "pseudo-problems" for the new paradigm, but overall, more new problems get solved). Questions for Study
7992	dbpedia	0	91	https://www.arpprootfh.com/obituaries/thomas-kuhn	en	Thomas M Kuhn Obituary 2022	https://cdn.tukioswebsites.com/social/facebook/fb_3/681c5b9c-4a2f-45de-91de-9664f0b82e12/abfcf5cd6820d1297df1bb4345986c54_88dd03c00894c6fbfbbdb7ccda032e50	https://cdn.tukioswebsites.com/social/facebook/fb_3/681c5b9c-4a2f-45de-91de-9664f0b82e12/abfcf5cd6820d1297df1bb4345986c54_88dd03c00894c6fbfbbdb7ccda032e50	[ "https://cdn.tukioswebsites.com/obituary_cover/lg/a727fd2f-deb5-415b-8665-cbe90a03cf26", "https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/s0KhLti8RX6B4OFUk4W1", "https://cdn.tukioswebsites.com/obituary_profile_photo/md/c2c90b05-45d4-4782-a090-3d8f21f4502b", "https://manage2.tukioswebsites.com/images/flower-cta.svg", "https://manage2.tukioswebsites.com/images/tree-cta.svg", "https://manage2.tukioswebsites.com/images/gift-cta.svg", "https://www.arpprootfh.com/obituaries/provider_thumbnail", "https://manage2.tukioswebsites.com/images/flower-cta.svg", "https://manage2.tukioswebsites.com/images/tree-cta.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Arpp, Root, & Carter" ]	2022-09-07T14:55:49	Thomas Michael Kuhn, age 64 passed away peacefully on February 27, 2022 at his home. He was born in Dayton, OH to George and Vera (Penny) Kuhn and lived in Germantown, the city...	en	https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/10xsrUaMTamkbjT0krZs	Arpp, Root, & Carter	https://www.arpprootfh.com/obituaries/thomas-kuhn	Thomas Michael Kuhn, age 64 passed away peacefully on February 27, 2022 at his home. He was born in Dayton, OH to George and Vera (Penny) Kuhn and lived in Germantown, the city he loved, his entire life. Tom was a member of boy Scout Troop #29, attended Valley View schools where he played basketball and graduated in 1975. He attended Purdue University where he was a member of the Delta Delta Chapter of Delta Sigma Phi Fraternity. His favorite colors were black and gold and he was an avid Boilermaker sports fan. Tom was proud of being the third-generation owner of George E. Kuhn and Company as well as the owner/operator of Kuhn's ACE Hardware and Miami Valley Propane. Tom was a two-term president of the Chamber of Commerce, a thirty-year member, past president and two-time Melvin Jones award winner of the Germantown Lions Club and past president of the Ohio Propane Gas Association. Besides his children and family business, Tom is most proud of his service as Chairman and member of the board of directors of the First National Bank of Germantown. Tom loved listening to all types of music at a very high level of volume on his Klipsch speakers, cruising the backroads, automobiles including his 1973 Javelin, Photography and crunchy peanut butter. Tom was preceded in death by his parents and sister. He is survived by his wife and first love, Julie Ann Kellis, son Michael (Tiffany) Kuhn, daughter Sarah Kuhn, son Dylan (Taylor Hickman) Kuhn, stepchildren Jamie (Ryan) Fields, Jonathon (Sherri) Cole, and grandchildren Emerson Kuhn, and Riley and Landon Fields. He is also survived by his sister Beth Kuhn and brothers-in-law Craig (Gina) Kellis and Chris (Yukiko) Kellis and families. Of special importance are friends Louis "Rip" Ripberger and Bob Casky, Jerry Steinmetz and Jeff Riley, Andy Minton, Mike Welch, Heidi Grant and Tom Custer. The family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Carl B. Kern Fund of the Dayton Foundation, 1401 S. Main St., Suite 100 Dayton, OH 45309 or online at daytonfoundation.org/tipofmth.html The fund, named for Tom's great-uncle, helps support Camp Kern and it's work with youth. The family will receive friends on Friday, March 4, 2022 from 4:00PM-7:00PM at the Arpp, Root and Carter Funeral Home, 29 N Main St. Germantown, OH 45327. Funeral Services will be held on Saturday, March 5th, 2022 at 10:00am at the funeral home, burial immediately following at Germantown Union Cemetery.
7992	dbpedia	0	2	https://archive.philosophersmag.com/thomas-kuhn-a-snapshot/	en	Thomas Kuhn: a snapshot	https://archive.philosophersmag.com/wp-content/themes/genesis-sample/images/favicon.ico	https://archive.philosophersmag.com/wp-content/themes/genesis-sample/images/favicon.ico	[ "https://archive.philosophersmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/TPM_logo.png", "https://www.philosophersmag.com/images/Issu-78-cover.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Kerrie Grain" ]	1998-01-01T00:00:02+00:00	Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He received a Ph. D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949 and remained there as an assistant professor of general education and history of science. In 1956, Kuhn accepted a post at the University of California–Berkeley, where in 1961 he […]	en	https://archive.philosophersmag.com/wp-content/themes/genesis-sample/images/favicon.ico	The Philosophers' Magazine Archive	https://archive.philosophersmag.com/thomas-kuhn-a-snapshot/	Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He received a Ph. D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949 and remained there as an assistant professor of general education and history of science. In 1956, Kuhn accepted a post at the University of California–Berkeley, where in 1961 he became a full professor of history of science. In 1964, he was named M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. In 1979 he returned to Boston, this time to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as professor of philosophy and history of science. In 1983 he was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Of the five books and countless articles he published, Kuhn’s most renown work is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which he wrote while a graduate student in theoretical physics at Harvard. Initially published as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, it was published in book form by the University of Chicago Press in 1962. It has sold some one million copies in 16 languages and is required reading in courses dealing with education, history, psychology, research, and, of course, history and philosophy of science. Throughout thirteen succinct but thought-provoking chapters, Kuhn argued that science is not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead, science is “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions,” which he described as “the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.” After such revolutions, “one conceptual world view is replaced by another.” Although critics chided him for his imprecise use of the term, Kuhn was responsible for popularising the term paradigm, which he described as essentially a collection of beliefs shared by scientists, a set of agreements about how problems are to be understood. According to Kuhn, paradigms are essential to scientific inquiry, for “no natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism.” Indeed, a paradigm guides the research efforts of scientific communities, and it is this criterion that most clearly identifies a field as a science. A fundamental theme of Kuhn’s argument is that the typical developmental pattern of a mature science is the successive transition from one paradigm to another through a process of revolution. When a paradigm shift takes place, “a scientist’s world is qualitatively transformed [and] quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory.” Kuhn also maintained that, contrary to popular conception, typical scientists are not objective and independent thinkers. Rather, they are conservative individuals who accept what they have been taught and apply their knowledge to solving the problems that their theories dictate. Most are, in essence, puzzle-solvers who aim to discover what they already know in advance – “The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly.” During periods of normal science, the primary task of scientists is to bring the accepted theory and fact into closer agreement. As a consequence, scientists tend to ignore research findings that might threaten the existing paradigm and trigger the development of a new and competing paradigm. For example, Ptolemy popularised the notion that the sun revolves around the earth, and this view was defended for centuries even in the face of conflicting evidence. In the pursuit of science, Kuhn observed, “novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.” And yet, young scientists who are not so deeply indoctrinated into accepted theories – a Newton, Lavoisier, or Einstein – can manage to sweep an old paradigm away. Such scientific revolutions come only after long periods of tradition-bound normal science, for “frameworks must be lived with and explored before they can be broken.” However, crisis is always implicit in research because every problem that normal science sees as a puzzle can be seen, from another perspective, as a counterinstance and thus as a source of crisis. This is the “essential tension” in scientific research. Crises are triggered when scientists acknowledge the discovered counterinstance as an anomaly in fit between the existing theory and nature. All crises are resolved in one of three ways. Normal science can prove capable of handing the crisis-provoking problem, in which case all returns to “normal.” Alternatively, the problem resists and is labelled, but it is perceived as resulting from the field’s failure to possess the necessary tools with which to solve it, and so scientists set it aside for a future generation with more developed tools. In a few cases, a new candidate for paradigm emerges, and a battle over its acceptance ensues – these are the paradigm wars. Kuhn argued that a scientific revolution is a noncumulative developmental episode in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one. But the new paradigm cannot build on the preceding one. Rather, it can only supplant it, for “the normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but actually incommensurable with that which has gone before.” Revolutions close with total victory for one of the two opposing camps. Kuhn also took issue with Karl Popper’s view of theory-testing through falsification. According to Kuhn, it is the incompleteness and imperfection of the existing data-theory fit that define the puzzles that characterise normal science. If, as Popper suggested, failure to fit were grounds for theory rejection, all theories would be rejected at all times. In the face of these arguments, how and why does science progress, and what is the nature of its progress? Kuhn argued that normal science progresses because members of a mature scientific community work from a single paradigm or from a closely related set and because different scientific communities seldom investigate the same problems. The result of successful creative work addressing the problems posed by the paradigm is progress. In fact, it is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assured. Moreover, “the man who argues that philosophy has made no progress emphasises that there are still Aristotelians, not that Aristotelianism has failed to progress.” As to whether progress consists in science discovering ultimate truths, Kuhn observed that “we may have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.” Instead, the developmental process of science is one of evolution from primitive beginnings through successive stages that are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. Kuhn argued that this is not a process of evolution toward anything, and he questioned whether it really helps to imagine that there is one, full, objective, true account of nature. He likened his conception of the evolution of scientific ideas to Darwin’s conception of the evolution of organisms. The Kuhnian argument that a scientific community is defined by its allegiance to a single paradigm has especially resonated throughout the multiparadigmatic (or preparadigmatic) social sciences, whose community members are often accused of paradigmatic physics envy. Kuhn suggested that questions about whether a discipline is or is not a science can be answered only when members of a scholarly community who doubt their status achieve consensus about their past and present accomplishments. Thomas Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954 and was awarded the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science in 1982. He held honorary degrees from institutions that included Columbia University and the universities of Notre Dame, Chicago, Padua, and Athens. He suffered from cancer during the last years of his life. Thomas Kuhn died on Monday, June 17, 1996, at the age of 73 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was survived by his wife and three children.
7992	dbpedia	2	88	https://physicsworld.com/a/thomas-kuhns-paradigm-shift-50/	en	Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift 50 years on – Physics World	https://physicsworld.com…20Kuhn20book.jpg	https://physicsworld.com…20Kuhn20book.jpg	[ "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/themes/iopp/static/img/iop-publishing-logo-white.png", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/themes/iopp/static/img/svg/logo-culture-history-society.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Astronomy_and_space_164193.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Atomic_and_molecular__774E92.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Biophysics_and_bioengineering__05958E-1.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Condensed_matter__774E92.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Culture.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Environment_and_energy__85AD21-1.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Instrumentation_and_measurement__9D9D9C.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Materials__0085C8.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mathematics_and_computation__EC660F.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Medical_physics__05958.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Optics_and_photonics__774E92.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Particle_and_nuclear__774E92.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/People.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Quantum__774E92.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Enterprise-cogs.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Culture.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Thomas20Kuhn20book.jpg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Hamish-96x96.jpg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Marketing-tile-311x197.jpg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/9-8-24-skateboard-pumping-350x197.jpg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2024-08-Ball-Fram-Hall-photo-cast-315x197.jpg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/8-8-24-Abdus-Salam-list-350x197.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Hamish Johnston" ]	2012-08-21T15:44:08+00:00	How a physicist changed the philosophy of science	en		Physics World	https://physicsworld.com/a/thomas-kuhns-paradigm-shift-50/	By Hamish Johnston “Great books are rare. This is one. Read it and you will see.” That’s the opening paragraph of an introductory essay included in the 50th anniversary edition of Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was first published in August 1962 by University of Chicago Press. About 1.4 million copies of the book have been sold and it was recently described by the Observer as “one of the most influential books of the 20th century”. The introductory essay is written by the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking, who explores how Kuhn’s ideas have changed our view of the scientific process over the past five decades – and how controversial they were when the book was first published. Kuhn was an American physicist who was born in 1922 and died in 1996. His career took an important turn in the 1950s when he taught a course at Harvard University on the history of science. At the time, science was seen as a cumulative process in which knowledge is built up gradually. As such, it should have been possible for Kuhn to look back over the ages and conclude that the ancient Greeks understood X% of mid-20th century physics, while Newton understood Y%. Instead, he realized that the way he understood physics was fundamentally different from how an ancient Greek philosopher understood physics. Indeed, he found it impossible to compare the science of ancient Greece with that of the mid-20th century – a property he later called “incommensurability”. Fascinated by these ideas, Kuhn gave up physics and focused first on the history of science and then its philosophy. Central to Kuhn’s analysis is the idea that our understanding of the universe has evolved in a series of discontinuities in which an intellectual framework (or paradigm) is built up, only to be brought crashing down in a crisis in which it becomes clear that theory is incapable of describing nature. An example familiar to physicists is the failure in the early 20th century of classical mechanics and electromagnetics to explain what we now understand as quantum physics. The two paradigms are incommensurate because quantum concepts such as superposition and entanglement simply do not exist in classical physics. The intervals between these “paradigm shifts” – a much used and abused phrase popularized by Kuhn – are dubbed as periods of “normal science”, in which scientists work within a paradigm and solve “puzzles” that are thrown up when observation doesn’t quite agree with theory. This is exactly where particle physicists have been for the last 50 years with the Standard Model. Although many hope the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will deliver observations that will put particle physics into a period of crisis, so far it has discovered exactly what it was expected to discover. Indeed, it must be the fear of some particle physicists that the LHC will end up being an extremely expensive puzzle solver rather than a shifter of paradigms.
7992	dbpedia	0	52	https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Kuhn-4395	en	Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996)	https://www.wikitree.com…ges/og-image.png	https://www.wikitree.com…ges/og-image.png	[ "https://www.wikitree.com/images/wikitree-small.png.pagespeed.ce.5G9g5z_Ayb.png", "https://www.wikitree.com/images/icons/male.gif.pagespeed.ce.sk2cBn-ts3.gif", "https://www.wikitree.com/images/icons/privacy60.png.pagespeed.ce.40ChhYgHYM.png", "https://www.wikitree.com/images/icons/map.gif.pagespeed.ce.dRGS_qcAFb.gif", "https://www.wikitree.com/images/icons/pedigree.gif.pagespeed.ce.4kSwuvQoBH.gif", "https://www.wikitree.com/images/icons/mail.gif.pagespeed.ce.Q4d4kzofWu.gif", "https://www.wikitree.com/photo.php/a/a2/WikiTree_Image_Library-37.png", "https://www.wikitree.com/images/icons/star.gif.pagespeed.ce.PFsRnIv2dh.gif", "https://www.wikitree.com/images/icons/star.gif.pagespeed.ce.PFsRnIv2dh.gif", "https://www.wikitree.com/images/icons/mail.gif.pagespeed.ce.Q4d4kzofWu.gif", "https://www.wikitree.com/images/icons/star.gif.pagespeed.ce.PFsRnIv2dh.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "Thomas Kuhn genealogy" ]	null	[]	1922-07-18T00:00:00	Is this your ancestor? Explore genealogy for Thomas Kuhn born 1922 Cincinnati, Ohio died 1996 including ancestors + more in the free family tree community.	en	/favicon.ico		https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Kuhn-4395	Ancestors Brother of [private brother (1920s - unknown)] [spouse(s) unknown] [children unknown] Died 17 Jun 1996 at age 73 [location unknown] Profile last modified 24 Jul 2023 \| Created 12 Oct 2018 This page has been accessed 1,165 times. Biography Thomas Kuhn is Notable. Thomas Kuhn was married twice, first to Kathryn Muhs with whom he had three children, then to Jehane Barton Burns (Jehane R. Kuhn). He was an American physicist, historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 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.[1] On 25 Apr 1930 at the time of the 1930 US Census, head of household Samuel Kuhn (age 35, born in Ohio) was employed as an Executive working in Investments and living in a home he rented for $350 at 137 East 94th in Manhattan, New York with his wife, Minette S. Kuhn (age 32, born in NY); son Thomas S. Kuhn (age 7, born in OH); son Roger T. Kuhn (age 5, born in NY); servant Margaret B. Couser (age 22, born in Scotland); lodger and servant Charlotte A. Helm (age 28, born in Germany); servant Hannah Schweigert (age 28, born in Germany). Samuel was first married at age 26; Minette was first married at age 23. Both of Samuel's parents were born in Ohio; both of Minette's parents were born in New York. [2] Sources ↑ Wikipedia: Thomas_Kuhn. ↑ "United States Census, 1930," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:X422-9HG : accessed 15 August 2021), Thomas S Kuhn in household of Samuel Kuhn, Manhattan (Districts 0501-0750), New York, New York, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) ED 539, sheet 30A, line 43, family 611, NARA microfilm publication T626 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2002), roll 1566; FHL microfilm 2,341,301. See also: 'Michael Faraday - a Sandemanian and Scientist' by Geoffrey Cantor
7992	dbpedia	3	11	https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/thomas-kuhns-skepticism-went-too-far	en	Thomas Kuhn’s Skepticism Went Too Far — John Horgan (The Science Writer)	http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fac380b9cda2c532cffb9e8/t/64c19198dd2b61077d66e6a9/1690407320617/kuhn1.jpg?format=1500w	http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fac380b9cda2c532cffb9e8/t/64c19198dd2b61077d66e6a9/1690407320617/kuhn1.jpg?format=1500w	[ "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fac380b9cda2c532cffb9e8/30857482-2152-439c-b97d-f4e7b4f08ee5/JHTSW.png?format=1500w", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fac380b9cda2c532cffb9e8/0acb9129-6a53-4b4e-ac2a-3fb95e77160e/JH.png?format=1500w", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fac380b9cda2c532cffb9e8/30857482-2152-439c-b97d-f4e7b4f08ee5/JHTSW.png?format=1500w", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fac380b9cda2c532cffb9e8/0acb9129-6a53-4b4e-ac2a-3fb95e77160e/JH.png?format=1500w", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fac380b9cda2c532cffb9e8/b76f43a2-01c1-4938-ae5b-4718a10ac2ed/kuhn1.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fac380b9cda2c532cffb9e8/d5e48a4a-0f70-4553-b495-a2a2c7e85bc9/John+by+Nikita+1.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "John Horgan" ]	2023-07-26T17:43:09-04:00	July 26, 2023. Thomas Kuhn, 1922-1996, is inescapable. If you find yourself in a debate about “truth,” there is a good chance that some blowhard will invoke this philosopher’s ideas. Below is an updated version of a profile of Kuhn that I wrote for my book The End of Science. My hope is that this p	en	https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fac380b9cda2c532cffb9e8/1605146169928-QHJE9KPOVK7MCUNB1MBP/favicon.ico?format=100w	John Horgan (The Science Writer)	https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/thomas-kuhns-skepticism-went-too-far	July 26, 2023. Thomas Kuhn, 1922-1996, is inescapable. If you find yourself in a debate about “truth,” there is a good chance that some blowhard will invoke this philosopher’s ideas. Below is an updated version of a profile of Kuhn that I wrote for my book The End of Science. My hope is that this piece—which is based on three-hour conversation I had with Kuhn in 1991—will provide insights into this profoundly ambiguous, ambivalent thinker. –John Horgan "Look," Thomas Kuhn says. The word is weighted with weariness, as if Kuhn is resigned to the likelihood that I will misinterpret him, but he is still going to try—no doubt in vain—to make his point. Kuhn utters the word often. "Look," he says again. He leans his gangly frame and long face forward, and his big lower lip, which ordinarily curls up amiably at the corners, sags. "For Christ's sake, if I had my choice of having written the book or not having written it, I would choose to have written it. But there have certainly been aspects involving considerable upset about the response to it." "The book" is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which may be the most influential treatise ever written on how science does (or does not) proceed. It is notable for having spawned the trendy term paradigm. It also foments the now-trite idea that personalities and politics play a large role in science. The book's most disturbing argument is less obvious: scientists can never truly understand the "real world" or even each other. Given this theme, one might think Kuhn would have expected his own message to be at least partially misunderstood. But when I talk to Kuhn in his cluttered office at MIT, he seems deeply pained by the breadth of misunderstanding of Structure. He is particularly upset by claims that he describes science as “irrational.” "If they had said a-rational I wouldn't have minded at all," he says with no trace of a smile. Kuhn's fear of compounding the confusion over his work has made him press shy. In fact, when I first telephone him to ask for an interview, he turns me down. "Look. I think not," he says. After I finally talk him into meeting me, Kuhn expresses discomfort at the notion of delving into the roots of his work. "One is not one's own historian, let alone one's own psychoanalyst," he warns me. He nonetheless traces his view of science to an epiphany that struck him in 1947, when he was working toward a doctorate in physics at Harvard. Reading Aristotle's Physics, Kuhn became astonished at how "wrong" it is. How could someone who wrote so brilliantly on other topics be so misguided when it came to physics? Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out his dormitory window ("I can still see the vines and the shade two thirds of the way down"), when suddenly Aristotle "made sense." Kuhn realized that Aristotle invests basic concepts with meanings unlike those of modern physics. By motion, for example, Aristotle means not just change in position but change in general—the reddening of the sun as well as its descent toward the horizon. Aristotle's physics, understood on its own terms, is simply different from Newtonian physics, not inferior to it. So Kuhn decided. Kuhn left physics for philosophy, and he struggled for 15 years to spell out the implications of his epiphany in Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The keystone of his model is the concept of a paradigm. Paradigm, pre-Kuhn, referred to an example that serves an educational purpose; amo, amas, amat, for instance, is a paradigm for teaching conjugations in Latin. Kuhn uses the term to refer to a set of procedures or ideas that instructs scientists, implicitly, what to believe and how to work. Most scientists never question the paradigm. They solve "puzzles," problems whose solutions reinforce and extend the scope of the paradigm rather than challenging it. Kuhn calls this "mopping up," or "normal science." There are always anomalies, phenomena that that the paradigm cannot account for or that even contradict it. Anomalies are often ignored, but if they accumulate, they may trigger a revolution--also called a paradigm shift, although not originally by Kuhn--in which scientists abandon the old paradigm for a new one. Kuhn holds that a revolution is destructive as well as creative. The proposer of a new paradigm stands on the shoulders of giants and bashes them over the head. He or she is often young or new to the field, that is, not fully indoctrinated. Most scientists yield to a new paradigm reluctantly. They often do not understand it, and they lack objective rules for judging it. Different paradigms have no common standard for comparison; they are "incommensurable," to use Kuhn's term. Proponents of different paradigms can argue forever without resolving their differences, because they invest basic terms—motion, particle, space, time—with different meanings. The conversion of scientists is thus a subjective and political process. It may involve sudden, intuitive understanding—like that achieved by Kuhn as he pondered Aristotle. Yet scientists often adopt a paradigm simply because their peers do. Kuhn rejects Karl Popper’s claim that science progresses when theories are disproved, or "falsified." Falsification, Kuhn contends, is no more possible than verification, because it wrongly implies the existence of absolute standards of evidence for judging theories. Just because modern physics has spawned computers, nuclear weapons and other applications, Kuhn says, does not mean it is truer, in an absolute sense, than Aristotle's physics. A new paradigm may solve puzzles better than an old one, and it may yield more practical applications. "But you cannot simply describe the other science as false," Kuhn says. He denies that science approaches truth; science, like life on earth, does not evolve toward anything but only away from something. Kuhn describes himself as a "post-Darwinian Kantian." Kant, too, believed that without some a priori paradigm the mind cannot impose order on sensory experience. But whereas Kant and Darwin each thought humans share more or less the same innate paradigm, Kuhn argues that our paradigms keep changing as our culture changes; whatever is universal in human experience, whatever transcends culture and history, is "ineffable," beyond the reach of language. Language, Kuhn says, "is not a universal tool. It's not the case that you can say anything in one language that you can say in another." But isn't mathematics a kind of universal language? I ask. Not really, Kuhn replies, since it has no meaning; it consists of syntactical rules without any semantic content. "There are perfectly good reasons why mathematics can be considered a language, but there is a very good reason why it isn't." By this point, I’m getting frustrated by Kuhn’s skepticism. Surely, I object, some scientific assertions are simply true or false. As an example, I bring up the claim of virologist Peter Duesberg that AIDS is not caused by the so-called human immunodeficiency virus, HIV. Duesberg is either right or wrong, I say, not just right or wrong within the context of a particular scientific-linguistic paradigm. Kuhn shakes his head and says: “I think when this all comes out, you’ll say, ‘Boy, I see why [Duesberg] believed that, and he was onto something.’ I’m not going to tell you he was right, or he was wrong. We don’t believe any of that anymore. But neither do we believe anymore what these guys who said [HIV] was the cause believe.” So are Kuhn’s own ideas true or not? "Look," Kuhn responds, frowning; he has heard this gotcha question before. "I think this way of talking and thinking that I am engaged in opens up a range of possibilities that can be investigated. But it, like any scientific construct, has to be evaluated simply for its utility—for what you can do with it." Then Kuhn, having set forth his bleak view of the limits of science and indeed of all human discourse, proceeds to complain about the many ways in which his book has been misinterpreted, especially by admirers. "I've often said I'm much fonder of my critics than my fans." He recalls students approaching him to say, "Oh, thank you Mr. Kuhn for telling us about paradigms. Now that we know about them, we can get rid of them." He insists that he does not believe science is entirely political, a reflection of the prevailing power structure. "In retrospect, I begin to see why this book fed into that, but boy, was it not meant to, and boy, does it not mean to." His protests were in vain. In one seminar, he tried to explain that the concepts of truth and falsity are perfectly valid, and even necessary—within a paradigm. "The professor finally looked at me and said, 'Look, you don't know how radical this book is.'" To Kuhn’s horror, he became the patron saint of would-be scientific revolutionaries. "I get a lot of letters saying, 'I've just read your book, and it's transformed my life. I'm trying to start a revolution. Please help me,' and accompanied by a book-length manuscript." He concedes he may be partly to blame for anti-science interpretations of Structure. After all, he compares scientists in the thrall of a paradigm to brainwashed characters in Orwell's 1984 and to drug addicts. But Kuhn emphasizes that he is pro-science, because science produces "the greatest and most original bursts of creativity" of any human enterprise. Kuhn is also appalled that the term paradigm has become a staple of pseudo-intellectual discourse. As early as 1974, a New Yorker cartoon mocked the trend: a young woman gushes to a smug-looking man, "Dynamite, Mr. Gerston! You're the first person I ever heard use 'paradigm' in real life." The low point came in 1990, when the Bush administration introduced an economic plan called "the New Paradigm" (which was really just trickle-down economics). Kuhn admits that Structure defines paradigm loosely. At one point paradigm refers to an archetypal experiment, such as Galileo's legendary (and probably apocryphal) dropping of objects from the Tower of Pisa. Elsewhere the term connotes "the entire constellation of beliefs" binding a scientific community together. Kuhn denies that he defines paradigm in 21 different ways, as one critic claims. But he no longer tries to explain exactly what he really means by the term. "If you've got a bear by the tail, there comes a point at which you've got to let it go and stand back," he sighs. I suspect that the ambiguity of Structure accounts, at least in part, for its power and persistence, its appeal to science skeptics and worshippers alike. Kuhn’s prose, like his speech, is never straightforward; he hedges all his statements with subjunctives and qualifiers. Structure should perhaps be viewed less as a work of philosophy than of literature, subject to multiple interpretations. Here is my interpretation. Kuhn’s epiphany in his Harvard dorm room back in 1947 was a kind of mystical vision. Kuhn saw—he knew!—that reality transcends language; any attempt to describe it obscures as much as it illuminates. Yes, many mystics have said as much. I agree with Kuhn that no matter how far science progresses, it will never solve the mystery of existence. But Kuhn takes this insight too far. He insists that because all theories fall short of absolute Truth, we can never call any of them “true”; because we cannot discover The Answer, the final solution to the riddle of reality, we cannot find any answers. This extreme skepticism is absurd. Science has given us many durable truths, embodied in theories such as heliocentrism, the atomic theory of matter, general relativity, the Big Bang, evolution by natural selection, DNA-based genetics, the germ theory of infectious disease. Speaking of infectious disease, Kuhn’s prediction that Peter Duesberg would come to be seen as neither right nor wrong turned out to be wrong. Terribly wrong. The denial of the HIV/AIDS link is now viewed as morally as well as empirically wrong. In part because of Duesberg’s influence, the South African government withheld anti-retroviral medications from its citizens for years; that decision, according to one study, resulted in more than 330,000 avoidable deaths. And yet, incredibly, a U.S. Presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has revived Duesberg’s claim that the HIV/AIDS link remains unproven. Perhaps Kuhn was right after all when he said, in response to my insistence that some claims are either true or false, “We don’t believe any of that anymore.” Thomas Kuhn is the prophet of our post-truth era. Further Reading: See my profiles of philosophers of science Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend. If you doubt we live in a post-truth era, check out this New York Times profile of old spoon-bender Uri Geller. It does not matter, the Times implies, whether Geller actually bends spoons with “psychic powers” as opposed to sleight of hand; what matters is that Geller is entertaining. And then there is the UFO insanity… Filmmaker Errol Morris, who briefly studied under Kuhn in the 1970s, ended up loathing the man and his philosophy. Morris’s savage criticism made me reconsider my view of Kuhn. See my conversation with Morris as well as these columns: Did Thomas Kuhn Help Elect Donald Trump? Second Thoughts: Did Thomas Kuhn Help Elect Donald Trump? Filmmaker Errol Morris Clarifies Stance on Kuhn and Trump
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7992	dbpedia	2	0	https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-S-Kuhn	en	Thomas S. 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Kuhn", "encyclopedia", "encyclopeadia", "britannica", "article" ]	null	[ "The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica" ]	1998-07-20T00:00:00+00:00	Thomas S. Kuhn was an American historian of science who is best known for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), one of the most influential works of history and philosophy written in the 20th century.	en	/favicon.png	Encyclopedia Britannica	https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-S-Kuhn	Thomas S. Kuhn (born July 18, 1922, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.—died June 17, 1996, Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American historian of science noted for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), one of the most influential works of history and philosophy written in the 20th century. Kuhn earned bachelor’s (1943) and master’s (1946) degrees in physics at Harvard University but obtained a Ph.D. (1949) there in the history of science. He taught the history or philosophy of science at Harvard (1951–56), the University of California at Berkeley (1956–64), Princeton University (1964–79), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979–91). More From Britannica philosophy of science: The work of Thomas Kuhn In his first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), Kuhn studied the development of the heliocentric theory of the solar system during the Renaissance. In his landmark second book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that scientific research and thought are defined by “paradigms,” or conceptual world-views, that consist of formal theories, classic experiments, and trusted methods. Scientists typically accept a prevailing paradigm and try to extend its scope by refining theories, explaining puzzling data, and establishing more precise measures of standards and phenomena. Eventually, however, their efforts may generate insoluble theoretical problems or experimental anomalies that expose a paradigm’s inadequacies or contradict it altogether. This accumulation of difficulties triggers a crisis that can only be resolved by an intellectual revolution that replaces an old paradigm with a new one. The overthrow of Ptolemaic cosmology by Copernican heliocentrism, and the displacement of Newtonian mechanics by quantum physics and general relativity, are both examples of major paradigm shifts. Kuhn questioned the traditional conception of scientific progress as a gradual, cumulative acquisition of knowledge based on rationally chosen experimental frameworks. Instead, he argued that the paradigm determines the kinds of experiments scientists perform, the types of questions they ask, and the problems they consider important. A shift in the paradigm alters the fundamental concepts underlying research and inspires new standards of evidence, new research techniques, and new pathways of theory and experiment that are radically incommensurate with the old ones.
7992	dbpedia	3	31	https://mprl-series.mpg.de/proceedings/8/3/index.html	en	The Nature of Scientific Knowledge: An Interview with Thomas S. Kuhn			[ "https://mprl-series.mpg.de/static/assets/images/mprl_logo_281x165.png", "https://mprl-series.mpg.de/media/proceedings/8/3/bigfiguresSigurdssonSigurdsson_Kuhn1_new.png", "https://mprl-series.mpg.de/media/proceedings/8/3/bigfiguresSigurdssonSigurdsson_Kuhn2_new.png", "https://mprl-series.mpg.de/media/proceedings/8/3/bigfiguresSigurdssonSigurdsson_Kuhn3_new.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "SkuÌli Sigurdsson" ]	null		en	../../../static/assets/images/favicon.png		null	The following interview was published in Harvard Science Review (winter 1990) [pp. 18–25] and conducted by Skúli Sigurdsson who at the time was a graduate student in history of science at Harvard University. We publish the original copy by courtesy of the HSR. The interview tape was transcribed by Katrin Chua (then editor of HSR). The photographs of Kuhn accompanying the text were made by Skúli Sigurdsson and chosen by Kuhn himself (from a whole 36-exposures film). An abridged version of the interview appeared in Persian translation by Elaheh Kheirandish in Science Policy Quarterly (Teheran), no. 3 (winter 1993). Interview [p. 18] Thomas S. Kuhn, professor of philosophy at MIT, is among the most influential figures in the study of the history of science. He is perhaps best known for his theories on the historical growth of scientific knowledge, which proceeds in what he calls conceptual ‘revolutions’ or ‘gestalt switches.’ In this interview, Kuhn discusses the origins of those theories, prominent reactions to them, and their implications for scientific truth. HSR: When you were an undergraduate at Harvard, what was it in the sciences that fascinated you and other students of your generation? What made you choose physics in particular? And do you think these motivations have changed over the years? Kuhn: I came to Harvard in the fall of 1940, terribly proud of having gotten in, only to discover later that I had been one of, say, 1000 students admitted, out of something like 1095 eligible applicants. Yes, situations have changed since those times! But there’s a story that will speak to your question about changes in attitude that have arisen since the summer of 1940. I wanted to major in mathematics or physics, simply because I had enjoyed them and been good at them. I came from a mathematical background, a theoretical outlook. I had taken both chemistry and physics in high school from a man who taught both. But while he knew the chemistry much better, I caught onto the physics. I remember suggesting consequences of what he taught us about the theory of heat, and he told me I was trying to f1y before I could walk. But that theoretical turn of mind—theoretical, ontological, cosmological, what you will, but an interest in fundamental problems; that was what drew me to mathematics and physics initially. Fig. 1.1: Thomas S. Kuhn being interviewed November 1989 in his office at MIT; photographer: Skúli Sigurdsson; picture: 11. So in the summer before I came to Harvard, I talked at length with my father about which of the two I should choose. And I have never forgotten what he said to me, because nobody would say it now. “If you have a strong preference for mathematics,” he said, “then I certainly [p. 19] think that is what you should follow. But if you don’t, perhaps it would be better to major in physics, because in mathematics, if you don’t make one of the good universities, the only things to do are to be an insurance company actuary or a high school teacher; whereas in physics, I think there are a few other opportunities. Bell Laboratory and General Electric are very interesting places, and then there are some government positions, like the Bureau of Standards, or the Naval Research Laboratory.” As I didn’t have a strong preference, I majored in physics. I don’t think I need to comment on the sense in which the situation has changed since that time. And clearly, it’s changed in motivation as well. It isn’t that you don’t have to like physics, or that most people don’t, but you don’t think that you’re giving up a great deal today in order to pursue it. I didn’t think I was giving up a great deal either, but the notion that physics was an area of expanding career opportunities was not one people had. There was a New Yorker article that appeared after WWII called “Farewell to String and Sealing Wax,” in which Sam Goudsmit talked about the enormous changes arising from the institutionalization of physics. That sense of a string and sealing wax career in physics was not unrepresentative of the sort of thing we had at the time. HSR: How did these changes affect your own studies? Kuhn: Freshman year was 1940. There was a war on in Europe. Sophomore year, there was Pearl Harbor, and at that point, anybody in physics at Harvard was urged to concentrate in electronics, so as to prepare to help the war effort. So I took a lot of electronics at the expense of physics, and much less liberal arts than I would have liked. For physics and math were by no means the only subjects I liked, and I also had a considerable interest in literature. I did my best to pursue those interests with some literature courses, and one very important course in philosophy—important, that is, in my own development. I was an editor of the Crimson, a member of an undergraduate literary society, that sort of thing. So there were real conflicts. I had the not uncommon problem of being reasonably good at and interested in things that went off on opposite directions. Now I’m sure you’re going to ask me at some point how I got out of physics, and one of the factors was that my interests had always been somewhat torn. But there’s certainly much more to the story. After graduating, I wound up working at the Radio Research Laboratory, doing radar counter measures out of the top of the biology building. After about a year’s work there, I went overseas to our advanced European Base in England, and there, worked mostly with the air force. We worked on technical intelligence problems, trying to learn about German radar installations, with an eye, of course, to jamming them; and on installing various sorts of equipment in aircraft. When I returned to Cambridge in the summer of ’45, things were over in Europe, but not yet over in Japan, and I was uncertain whether I was going to be sent off to the Pacific to do the same sort of thing. Those experiences were also part of the reason that my feelings towards physics as a career were gradually changing; I didn’t find my war science terribly interesting. It’s not out of the question that had I gone to Los Alamos as some of my contemporaries at Harvard did, and been working in that environment, I might never have left the field. I suspect I would have, and certainly have no regrets about having done it, but there was something in the fact that I found the sort of work I was doing something of a drag. Fig. 1.2: Thomas S. Kuhn being interviewed November 1989 in his office at MIT; photographer: Skúli Sigurdsson; picture: 23. Then came a fortuitous situation—when I finally heard that I wouldn’t be going to Japan, the fall semester was just about starting at Harvard, and there I was. So I went on and took my degree in physics. But increasingly as I continued my work, I wondered whether a physics career was what I really wanted. I was very conscious of [p. 20] the narrowing, the specialization required, and though I had no conclusion on that score, I was beginning to look for alternatives. No one of those seemed more attractive than the rest, until all of a sudden I was asked to assist President [James B.] Conant in teaching an experimental General Education course on the history of science, through readings of case histories. It sounded like a pretty good idea; it would be a good experience, a chance to work with the President of Harvard, and also my first exposure to history of science. So I grabbed the opportunity and found it fascinating. At our first meeting, Conant turned to me and said “I can’t imagine a General Education course in science that doesn’t have something about mechanics in it. But I’m a chemist, I can’t imagine how to do that! You’re a physicist, go find out!” So I went out to learn something about the history of mechanics, and it rapidly became clear that if it was going to be a case history, it would have to be built around Galileo , since Newton would have been far too complicated. And to do that, I would have to learn something about what people had believed before Galileo. So I wound up looking at a series of monographs by Alexandre Koyré , called Etudes galiléennes [1939], and I started to read Aristotle’s Physics. And the experience was enlightening. What Aristotle could be saying baffled me at first, until—and I remember the point vividly—I suddenly broke in and found a way to understand it, a way which made Aristotle’s philosophy make sense. It was that case history, and others, that in some sense first got me onto the idea of gestalt switches and changes in conceptual frameworks, which was to show up in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. I had this long-standing interest in philosophy. I had been reading a lot of elementary philosophy of science during the war—[Bertrand] Russell , [Philipp] Frank , and [Percy W.] Bridgman, though unfortunately not much [Rudolf] Carnap . And I also was mulling over certain ideas about scientific method that I’d happened upon while being trained in the sciences. There are certain implications about what historical growth of knowledge is that I felt deserved greater consideration. So this project seemed important, worth working on, and something that might be just the thing to take as an alternative to physics. And that’s the story of how I got into physics, and how I got out of it. HSR: In the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, you discuss the notion of conceptual changes in the development of scientific knowledge. As you’ve mentioned, it first arose during your struggle with Aristotle’s Physics. What, specifically, did this understanding amount to? In what ways, perhaps, is it more than simply making a translation? Kuhn: What I discovered in studying Aristotle was that a text required interpretation. And by interpretation I mean something similar to what was then quite well known in Europe (although I didn’t know it at the time) as hermeneutics, but without all the claims of hermeneutics as a way to Truth. It was a way of reading texts, of looking for things that don’t quite fit, puzzling over them, and then suddenly finding a way of sorting out the pieces. I had never heard of interpretation in that sense, for I’d never read any continental philosophy. But in reading Aristotle, I began to see what sort of physics this had been, and why it had been taken so seriously, which had not been in the least visible to me before. What I discovered was not the fact that you could translate, but rather that you couldn’t. You can teach Aristotle, but you have to teach some part of his vocabulary in order to do it, and there’s no way you can put that vocabulary in its entirety into the vocabulary you had when you came to the text in the first place. So it was untranslatability, rather than translatability that I increasingly saw in studying the history of science. HSR: Since you published the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, there has been widespread reaction to it. In retrospect, what surprises you most at the responses? How do you see some of the misinterpretations of the book as being related to specific problems within philosophy or history of science? Kuhn: I would first distinguish between philosophy of science and history of science. Mine was a historical approach. But what I thought was important in looking at [p. 21] the history was the notion of a revolution, the sort of rupture that the gestalt switch was intended to represent. I was talking about the non-cumulativeness of the development of knowledge, the problem with bringing an older science to the bar of judgment of a later one; about the inappropriateness of speaking of Aristotle as simply having made a mistake when he spoke of heavy bodies as falling faster than light bodies; about the sort of vocabulary I objected to, which took Aristotle as being merely false, the abhorrence of a vacuum as merely a mistake. I found something wrong with the standard way of grinding clearly bright and influential historical figures in the meat grinder of the categories or laws of a later science. These notions were not going to strike people who came to history primarily as historians, and philosophers were certainly going to have a lot to say about the issue. Of the things that surprised me tremendously in the reactions to Structure, a major one was the talk about irrationality, for that was something that had never occured to me. I didn’t know how the word ‘rationality’ functioned in philosophy of science. And so the notion that I was showing the irrationality of science absolutely blew my mind. I did spend substantial time and rhetoric in Structure discussing the quite different notion that when people talk about proof in the sciences, it isn’t like proof in mathematics; that the former has none of the latter’s force of compulsion. I was not saying, however, that there aren’t good reasons in scientific proofs, good but never conclusive reasons. In formal mathematics, if two people disagree about this being a correct proof, we can take them through it one step at a time, and one of them can be forced to acknowledge the other side. There’s just nothing like that in the sciences. That was what I was trying to say in Structure. So I was surprised at the extent of the reaction to it as a charge of science’s irrationality. I found something wrong with the standard way of grinding clearly bright and influential historical figures in the meat grinder of the categories or laws of a later science. I was also surprised at the relativism charge. Not that I didn’t see why it was made, but it seemed to me that if relativism was what my thoughts amounted to, it was not nearly so damaging as the sort of relativism it was being taken to be. And it wasn’t clear to me that relativism was the right word to be used at all. Essentially, I drew a Darwinian parallel in the first edition of Structure, to remind people that getting a better and better instrument (the hand and the eye were standard examples) does not require a process aimed at a pre-existent goal. Evolution isn’t guided towards some preconceived perfect form, and I was arguing that science wasn’t either. Now while it’s clear why Darwin and the notion of evolution upset people, it wasn’t clear at all that relativism was the proper charge to level. HSR: This talk of irrationality became prevalent as the sixties drew on, against the backdrop of much criticism in American society of the Vietnam War. How do you see some of the responses to your book in light of these larger social movements and the criticism initiated by them? Kuhn: I’m sure that part of the reason the book attracted the sort of attention that it did, particularly among people who were under thirty in the sixties, was for exactly those reasons. It could be used, and was used as a whip with which to beat the sciences. I am told that [Herbert] Marcuse and Kuhn were the heroes on the campus of San Francisco State. After all, that was my second book with the word “Revolution” in the title! I’m sure that part of what went on was due to those trends, and I had a number of relatively radical students who came along hoping that I would inculcate the new revolution or something, which I didn’t do. Evolution isn’t guided towards some pre-conceived perfect form and I was arguing that science wasn’t either. Now while it’s clear why Darwin and the notion of evolution upset people, it wasn’t clear at all that relativism was the proper charge to level. I discovered that students who had been attracted to history of science because of this book didn’t have a clue, and on the whole neither did my colleagues, as to where this book had come from. I taught people how to read texts, trying to replicate my experience with Aristotle . The people who did discover what I thought Structure was about were those who took graduate seminars with me, in which we read Kelvin or Maxwell or Galileo or whoever, [p. 22] closely, and tried to figure out how those people could ever have said the sorts of things they said. That’s always been for me the central part of that book, and of course it scarcely shows. We asked, “Why would he say that?” We found things that didn’t make sense, and tried to find a way of reading that would make it make sense. For it is only at that point that a text you thought you understood takes on a somewhat different significance. I am told that [Herbert] Marcuse and Kuhn were the heroes on the campus of San Francisco State. After all, that was my second book with the word ‘Revolution’ in the title! HSR: How would you say your notion of revolution differs from more common connotations of the word, in particular, with respect to whether in studying the history of science, our aim is to deconstruct and undermine the basis of science’s validity, or rather to reconstruct those foundations? Kuhn: I was not trying to deconstruct science. I’m still not trying to deconstruct science. I’m not all that sure I understand what deconstruction is. But there’s an important element that persists in me that Dr. Johnson’s argument against Berkeley was right—that you can refute the person who doesn’t believe in material bodies by kicking the stone. Experiment and observation really do play an absolutely crucial role in the development of the sciences. There are many things to be said about the nature of progress in the sciences; the thing that you cannot I think say coherently is that they get closer and closer to the truth. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a coherent evolutionary development, that there aren’t criteria with respect to which they can improve with time. But those are primarily instrumental criteria. The sort of thing I now say, and was not very far from saying in the last chapter of Structure, is that truth, at least in the form of a law of noncontradiction, is absolutely essential. You can’t have reasonable negotiation or discourse about what to say about a particular knowledge claim if you believe that it could be both true and false. One has to notice, however, how different all this is from a notion of truth which is a correspondence to something external to the logic, the theoretical system, the conceptual scheme. You have to split those two conceptions of truth quite wide apart, stop working back and forth as though this prerequisite for the sort of discourse which can sustain agreement on different points, which requires a law of noncontradiction and a corresponding notion of truth and falsity, were the same as a notion of Absolute Truth. The first thing is something one cannot get on without. But there are all sorts of ways one can go from talking about the relationships of older and newer theories without having to say the new one makes the old one false. I take theories to be whole systems, and as such they don’t need to be true or false. All we need to do is by some criteria or other decide which one we would rather have. In general, this is roughly specifiable, but that doesn’t get me into the true-false game. Of course, it doesn’t eliminate true-false as very important. That’s what you do within a system,—judge the truth or falsity of statements. Across a system you can’t apply that sort of calculation. HSR: Many people have argued that scientific theories are underdetermined by the evidence. That is, more than one theory could adequately account for any given body of evidence. Would you distinguish between that idea and your own, and to what extent do you think that notion can be taken? What about the argument that although many theories may be adequate, the nature of scientific gathering of data renders those theories far more determined than we might originally think? What do you think of the notion that science might after all be converging upon a sort of Truth? Kuhn: I’ve never worried a lot about the underdetermination thesis, but I’ve no quarrel with it, at least in the weak form that a theory is underdetermined by any finite body of evidence. The stronger forms, however, seem to me vastly more difficult to prove or to make out than I think people usually take them to be. One way of making the underdetermination point is to use something like Nelson Goodman’s argument that it’s always possible to generate an incompatible theory by redefining the terms of the theory from which you started, so that both account for the evidence you actually have. You can use his paradox that all emeralds are “grue” or “bleen,” and ask how that’s any worse a theory than the one that says emeralds are green or blue. I take those techniques to be available for argument, but also to be not quite to the point, though I would hate to have to say in exactly what respect they aren’t! They are brilliant arguments and they’re about something important, but they don’t cut quite the ice that some people think they do with respect to underdetermination. Nevertheless, I think there’s real plausibility about the underdetermination thesis. However, what I don’t find plausible are the arguments that say even with all possible evidence, the theories would still be underdetermined. The argument becomes [p. 23] problematic as soon as you start assuming such ideal situations, and at that point, I’m unhappy with the claim. Furthermore, if that’s a reasonable unhappiness, then I simply want to say that I am uncertain what would happen to the argument, even with a limited amount of data, if I were allowed to have total accuracy; if I didn’t have to take into account that data is always approximate and that it leaves a certain penumbra around itself. I think it’s at least possible that with full precision on the observations that I have, which is of course just as unavailable as an infinite body of potential data, then maybe I would not be able to find two equally valid theories either. Considering all possible data, do you really get Kepler’s laws from Newton’s? Well, you don’t quite. Do you get Galileo’s law of fall from Newton’s , well not exactly, just near the surface of the earth. So I’m not sure what happens to even this more limited version of the thesis, if one doesn’t acknowledge that theories are only approximately the same, that the data is the best you can hope for within the limits of error. That’s the way I feel about the question of underdetermination, and although I don’t quite want to say it’s an entirely different ballpark, I don’t think it has direct relevance to the sorts of things I was saying in Structure. There are two main sorts of people who talk about the underdetermination thesis. In Emerson Hall, [W.V.O.] Quine and [Hilary] Putnam both talk about it, and both of them would, I think, see me as being somewhat of an idealist. But then the strong program people also talk about underdetermination, in order to show that science has no content, and from that point of view I’m on the Quine-Putnam side. So the underdetermination thesis constantly gets talked about, but I can be heard as being on either side of it. I certainly don’t think it’s a mistaken thesis, though I think there are some things one would like to know about just how strong a thesis it is. I take theories to be whole systems, and as such they don’t need to be true or false. All we need to do is by some criteria or other decide which one we would rather have. HSR: In the early sixties you directed a project, the Archive for the History of Quantum Physics, where you and your co-workers conducted interviews with the scientists who had played key roles in the development of quantum physics. Why do you suppose you were chosen to direct the quantum project, what intrigued you most about it, and did the experience affect your view of the ideas set forth in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions? Kuhn: I was asked to help direct the project because I had a PhD in physics, and was a known historian of science. I was not unique in that respect, but I was one of very few people who had both those qualifications. I knew as a historian that scientists’ recollections of their own work is quite bad historically; that they see themselves as having worked towards the thing they eventually discovered, although when you look back you find that in fact they were looking for something entirely different. So I did not expect that the interviews would produce the sort of information about sources of discovery that the physicists on the committee expected. But I also knew that if you study the papers against the recollections of the scientists, you often find terribly important clues about the processes the scientists had gone through. Here’s what the man says, here’s what the paper says, and they’re obviously incompatible. Now what could it be that leads him to this memory construct as opposed to some other? You often get clues that way. So that’s what I thought would occur, and what surprised me, then, was the number of times I got simply “I don’t remember [...] How would you expect me to remember something like that.” Part of it, as a couple of scientists said fairly explicitly, was that trying to remember is uncomfortable, under these circumstances. The people who write autobiographies have made themselves go through the process, were motivated to go through it. But have somebody come in for five days with a tape-recorder, and they merely don’t remember. I would say that the project had substantially no effect on my views in Structure. I never thought that Structure was more than a highly schematic sketch. I did not expect any direct lessons. I’ve always said, assimilate this point of view and this way of doing it, and then see what it does for you when you try to write a history, but don’t go out looking at history to see whether this is true or false, to test the ideas. The only test of the ideas, at least at this level of development, is going to be whether having assimilated those ideas, you see the material usefully different. But it’s not going to be “Can you always locate the paradigm, can you always tell the difference between a revolution and a normal development?” It’s not meant to be applied that way. It is also the case that my concerns are ultimately much more with epistemology than with philosophy of science. I want to know what the nature of knowledge is. HSR: When the quantum project was undertaken, historians of science were generally not looking at contemporary science. Nowadays, the emphasis seems to have shifted from the eighteenth century to the late [p. 24] nineteenth and far into the twentieth centuries, where science itself has become a much larger, more complex and institutionalized enterprise, with many more texts and much more science to consider. How do you see the changes in history of science in terms of both the Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the quantum project? Kuhn: I think the Quantum Physics project probably did play a role in the development of history of science, in that it labeled the existence of an archive publicly enough so that nobody could write on something without going to look at that material. It wouldn’t have been respectable. It almost didn’t matter whether the material was good or not. You establish a base-line which sets a level for scholarship, and it helps. I think work is being done not necessarily always very well, but probably with a higher level of responsibility to evidence than it would have been if that material hadn’t existed. That’s not meant to be a tremendously big claim, and it’s not the reason I got into the project. But as I watched what happened later, yes, some people were attracted to twentieth-century stuff because that material was there, and I think it meant that anybody doing twentieth-century stuff had to look at archives, whether the material was in that archive or elsewhere. In that sense the project made history of science a more scholarly discipline. Now the other question about how, when science gets as big as it has, can we know the texts—I don’t know the answer. I see it as a question about practice, not a question about principles. I think the best study in conceptual change I’ve done is my Planck book [1978], although it’s not always been viewed that way. And that doesn’t begin to tell you about gigantic science. But it sure as hell presents problems of scale not found when working on Galileo , and it was still feasible to write conceptual history. I’ve never tried anything that gets to post WWII science, and I absolutely see that it’s difficult. But if you feel as I do that there are many more traces left of the stories than their authors and editors think there are, there are going to be clues. The problems are gigantic, but I’m not persuaded that there’s nothing to be done about reconstructing conceptual change. How much of it can be done and in what ways, I’m not sure. But I think that whole business of looking for the things that don’t make sense still applies. John [L.] Heilbron and I wrote a paper about the genesis of the Bohr atom, which we started during the Quantum Physics project when we read Bohr’s 1913 paper, in preparation for interviewing him. There were 2 or 3 passages in there that made absolutely no sense. Taken as a whole, the paper gives the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom on the one hand, and on the other, an atom with only a ground state, but in which the electron strums all the strings as it falls into the ground state from outside the atom. I don’t think traces of that sort are going to have vanished. And they lead back through footnotes and other things into earlier papers, as the Bohr paper led back to a [C.G.] Darwin paper, which proved a very useful piece of background for understanding it. It’s also the case that my concerns are ultimately much more with epistemology than with philosophy of science. I want to know what the nature of knowledge is. I think science is an excellent thing to look at, if you’re concerned with epistemology, and that’s no novelty on my part—that has been going on since the seventeenth century when science provided epistemological examples. And with that interest, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to me if things are now different. I see no reason to suppose that the things I think I have learned about the nature of knowledge are going to be disturbed by the need to change the theory of science. I could be all wrong with respect both to science and to the nature of knowledge, but I would make this separation to explain why I’m less concerned about the question “Is science changing?” than I might be if studying the nature of science weren’t in the first instance simply a way of looking at the picture of knowledge. I see no reason to suppose that the things I think I have learned about the nature of knowledge are going to be disturbed by the need to change the theory of science. HSR: How do the developments in the last thirty years which we have been discussing, bear upon your interests today? What are your current thoughts and projects? Kuhn: What I’ve been working on for the last eight years [p. 25] and may be working on for the next five, is a book about the philosophical problems, especially incommensurability, left over from the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I’ve been going back to the book and looking at whether in fact those thoughts I had are going to work with what’s been going on in philosophy of science recently, to see how I can deal with those other ideas. As I’ve said, when I wrote Structure, I hadn’t read much philosophy of science, and had no idea how much was going on in that field. I had seen what I thought was something important about the way science and conceptual frameworks worked, and that’s what I was writing about. But today I would look at what Quine has to say, what Putnam has to say, and they both have a lot to say about science. I think I see a way in which what I was doing in Structure might be made to take account of all that. But I’m not sure. It might be that in these contexts, the ideas in Structure will have to be revised, it might not. So I’ve been reading a good bit of that, and now I think I’ve got it all ready enough to begin writing. But of course when I write, well there’s no guarantee that it will turn out the way I envisioned things when I started. I’ve learned that the greatest changes come about when the actual writing begins. But this is certainly another one of those books that will be a decade at least in the making, a decade or more, I can’t say at this point. But that’s what I’m working on now. Fig. 1.3: Thomas S. Kuhn being interviewed November 1989 in his office at MIT; photographer: Skúli Sigurdsson; picture: 10. Thomas S. Kuhn is the author of: The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) Sources for History of Quantum Physics: An Inventory and Report (1967) [co-authored with John L. Heilbron , Paul Forman and Lini Allen ] The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977) Black-body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912 (1978)
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7992	dbpedia	2	92	https://news.mit.edu/1996/kuhn-0724	en	Fall memorial planned for Professor T.S. Kuhn	https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico	https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico	[ "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	1996-07-24T09:00:00+00:00		en	/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico	MIT News \| Massachusetts Institute of Technology	https://news.mit.edu/1996/kuhn-0724	An MIT memorial service will be held in the fall for Professor Emeritus Thomas S. Kuhn, who died June 17 at his home in Cambridge at the age of 73. He had been ill for the last two years with cancer of the bronchial tubes and throat. Professor Kuhn was an internationally known historian and philosopher who made seminal contributions to understanding how scientific views are supported and discounted over time. The author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), an enormously influential work on the nature of scientific change, he was widely celebrated as the central figure in contemporary thought about how the scientific process evolves. In MIT's Commencement address in June, Vice President Albert Gore spoke of the relationship "between science and technology on the one hand and humankind and society on the other" and referred to "the great historian of science, Thomas Kuhn." Before Professor Kuhn's work, scientific evolution was commonly understood as the patient and progressive accumulation of knowledge about the world. In Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Professor Kuhn rejected this understanding in favor of an historical and social conception, based on a distinction between normal and revolutionary science. Normal science-the dominant enterprise-is puzzle-solving: scientists solve problems within settled frameworks of inquiry that are not themselves tested but simply taken for granted. They model their solutions on scientific paradigms-the exemplary solutions to once-outstanding puzzles that scientists master as part of their training (for example, Newton's derivation of planetary orbits from his laws of motion). In revolutionary periods (for example, the overthrow of Newtonian by relativist mechanics), Professor Kuhn said, unsolved puzzles or anomalies accumulate, and some scientists propose alternative frameworks of inquiry, often profoundly discontinuous with earlier views. Revolutions succeed when a new, incommensurably different outlook is better able to handle the previously unsolved anomalies and win the allegiance of younger scientists. In Kuhn's vision, then, science is not a smooth evolution of human knowledge, but an historical process in which periods of relative calm are punctuated by dramatic breaks in understanding. From 1982 to 1991, when he retired, Dr. Kuhn was the first Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor in Philosophy at MIT. Jed Z. Buchwald, the Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and director of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, said Professor Kuhn "was the most influential historian and philosopher of science of our time. He instructed and inspired his students and colleagues at Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton and MIT, as well as the tens of thousands of scholars and students in his own and other fields of social science and the humanities who read his works." Professor Kuhn joined MIT in 1979 from Princeton University, where he had been the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of the History of Science and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. At MIT, his work centered on cognitive and linguistic processes that bear on the philosophy of science, including the influence of language on the development of science. Born in Cincinnati in 1922, Professor Kuhn studied physics at Harvard, where he received the SB (1943), AM (1946) and PhD (1949). He taught at Harvard and at the University of California at Berkeley before joining Princeton in 1964. From 1978 to 1979 he was a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities. His honors included the Howard T. Behrman Award for distinguished achievements in the humanities (1977), the History of Science Society's George Sarton Medal (1982) and the Society for Social Studies of Science's John Desmond Bernal Award (1983). He became a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and was given honorary degrees by several universities throughout the world. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Philosophy of Science Association (president, 1988-90), and the History of Science Society (president, 1968-70). Professor Kuhn is survived by his wife, Jehane R. Kuhn; two daughters, Sarah Kuhn of Framingham and Elizabeth Kuhn of Los Angles; a son, Nathaniel S. Kuhn of Arlington; a brother, Roger S. Kuhn of Bethesda; and four grandchildren, Emma Kuhn LaChance, Samuel Kuhn LaChance, Gabrielle Gui-Ying Kuhn and Benjamin Simon Kuhn. He previously was married to Kathryn Muhs of Princeton, NJ, who is the mother of his children. Contributions in his memory may be made to Hospice of Cambridge and mailed to 245 Winter St., Waltham, 02154.
7992	dbpedia	3	66	https://interintellect.com/salon/thomas-kuhns-philosophy-of-science/	en	Thomas Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science	https://interintellect.c…pJH9gY4Ib96Y.jpg	https://interintellect.c…pJH9gY4Ib96Y.jpg	[ "https://interintellect.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/cropped-Diagonal-4-1.png", "https://interintellect.com/wp-content/plugins/the-events-calendar/src/resources/images/tribe-loading.gif", "https://interintellect.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/imgonline-com-ua-twotoone-cttpJH9gY4Ib96Y.jpg", "https://interintellect.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Kopia-–-Thumbnail_ii-41-1024x576.png", "https://interintellect.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/24cd4915-99d9-477a-8d80-d0600b0ef3f1-1024x576.jpeg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2022-06-25T03:20:24+00:00	Hi, I am Arkadiusz Synowczyk. I am a philosophy student at Newcastle University (UK). My areas of specialization are epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and philosophy of science. You can… Continue reading Thomas Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science	en	https://interintellect.c…icon-1-32x32.png	Interintellect	https://interintellect.com/salon/thomas-kuhns-philosophy-of-science/	Hi, I am Arkadiusz Synowczyk. I am a philosophy student at Newcastle University (UK). My areas of specialization are epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and philosophy of science. You can find me on Twitter. Thomas Kuhn is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century. His most famous book – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – is the most cited social science book in history and one of the most cited academic books of all time. Given such an influence of Kuhn, it is important to understand and know his ideas. But what are those? The central ideas of his philosophy of science, like incommensurability or world-change, are often difficult to understand. Moreover, some claim that he was a radical relativist who attacked science. Others – including Kuhn himself – deny the charge. This salon aims to explain Kuhn’s philosophy of science and answer the ambiguities about his ideas. But that’s not all. One of the most important reasons to care about ideas is their real-life consequences. Therefore, the second aim of this salon is to engage in a moderated discussion about 1) the concrete, practical consequences of accepting his ideas, and 2) whether his ideas are true or not (or even whether truth is a legitimate concept). If you have any questions about the salon, contact me via arkadiuszsynowczyk@gmail.com. Recommended readings: Postscript to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (publicly available through Google) Readings for advanced study: Thomas Kuhn by Alexander Bird Thomas Kuhn by Thomas Nickles Interpreting Kuhn: Critical Essays by K. Brad Way *** 🗓 ii Calendar 📋 Code of Conduct
7992	dbpedia	1	90	https://gordoncemerickfuneralhome.com/tribute/details/309/Thomas-Kuhn/obituary.html	en	Obituary of Thomas M. Kuhn	https://gordoncemerickfu…/Thomas-Kuhn.jpg	https://gordoncemerickfu…/Thomas-Kuhn.jpg	[ "https://gordoncemerickfuneralhome.com/869/Full/Emerick-Banner.jpg", "https://gordoncemerickfuneralhome.com/tribute-images/559/Ultra/Thomas-Kuhn.jpg", "https://gordoncemerickfuneralhome.com/tribute-images/side-image/2557/Ultra/1x1.jpg", "https://gordoncemerickfuneralhome.com/tribute-images/side-image/2557/Ultra/1x1.jpg", "https://gordoncemerickfuneralhome.com/tribute-images/559/Ultra/Thomas-Kuhn.jpg", "https://gordoncemerickfuneralhome.com/tribute-images/side-image/2557/Ultra/1x1.jpg", "https://gordoncemerickfuneralhome.com/tribute-images/side-image/2557/Ultra/1x1.jpg", "https://gordoncemerickfuneralhome.com/870/Ultra/homePage_connect-FB.png?rand=3418.642035379722", "https://gordoncemerickfuneralhome.com/871/Ultra/Emerick_Logo.png?mediaFile=true&rand=4182.293647900224" ]	[]	[]	[ "In memory of", "Thomas M. Kuhn", "Obituary", "obit", "tribute", "notice", "death", "honor", "remember", "funeral", "cremation", "burial", "obits", "obituary", "obituaries", "funeral servcies", "online tributes" ]	null	[]	null	Thomas M. Kuhn, 89, of Clifton Park, beloved husband of Elizabeth H. Paniccia Elder Kuhn of Clifton Park, died peacefully on Saturday, September 30,	en			https://gordoncemerickfuneralhome.com/tribute/details/309/Thomas-Kuhn/obituary.html	Thomas M. Kuhn, 89, of Clifton Park, beloved husband of Elizabeth H. Paniccia Elder Kuhn of Clifton Park, died peacefully on Saturday, September 30, 2017. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, he was the son of the late C. John and Virginia Mansfield Kuhn and was a graduate of Montclair High School and Alfred University where he earned his Bachelor's Degree in Agricultural Engineering. He was a U.S. Army veteran from 1950 to 1952, serving as a Technical Sergeant and was awarded the Army of Occupation Medal - Germany. Mr. Kuhn retired after 30 years of service from Chrysler Corporation in Syracuse where he had been a Service Development Engineer. Dedicated to his faith, community and country, Tom was a member of the Shenendehowa United Methodist Church, Clifton Park-Halfmoon Memorial VFW Post #1498, the Shenendehowa Lions Club, Shenendehowa Senior Center, AARP where he was an instructor of the “55 Alive” program, served as a Poll Inspector for Elections, was a volunteer at the NYS Military Museum in Saratoga Springs, at the Saratoga Automobile Museum, Saratoga National Battlefield and Charter Member of the Saratoga National Cemetery Honor Guard Association. He was also an avid golfer and was a Cub Scout leader for Pack 48 and Assistant Scout Master for Troop 48. Beloved husband of Elizabeth, devoted father of Thomas M. Kuhn, Jr. (Terri) of Halfmoon, Rhonda Kuhn Reynolds of Bolton Landing, Kristyn Kuhn (Jeff) of Annapolis, MD and Karen Wright (Ehron) of Lancaster, PA, stepfather of Gina Lysyczyn (Donald) of Clifton Park, Samuel Paniccia (Anna) of Huntington, LI, NY and Paula Paniccia (Sara Norman) of Duanesburg, grandfather of Karla Salvi, Taylor and Jordan Stout, Taylor Anne and Mick Reynolds and Arwyn Wright, step grandfather of Shaye Norman Paniccia, Nicholas and Alexis Lysyczyn and Michael, Matthew and Christopher Paniccia. Relatives and friends are invited and may call at the Gordon C. Emerick Funeral Home, 1550 RT-9 Clifton Park, New York 12065 on Thursday from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Funeral service will be celebrated on Friday morning at 10:00 a.m. at Shenendehowa United Methodist Church, 971 NY-146, Clifton Park, New York 12065 which will be followed by burial with military honors at 12 noon at the Gerald B.H. Solomon Saratoga National Cemetery in Schuylerville. Those desiring, may make memorial contributions to Mary's Haven, 35 New St., Saratoga Springs, NY 12866 or to Community Hospice of Saratoga, 179 Lawrence St., Saratoga Springs, NY 12866, in memory of Thomas M. Kuhn. Please express your condolences by using the green "Add Condolence" tab below.
7992	dbpedia	0	33	https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn.html	en	Thomas Kuhn			[ "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/extensions/FlaggedRevs/client/img/2.png", "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/extensions/FlaggedRevs/client/img/arrow-down.png", "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/images/thumb/Information.svg/20px-Information.svg.png", "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/skins/vector/images/search-ltr34ed.png?301", "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/skins/common/images/poweredby_mediawiki_88x31.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	../favicon.html		null	From Knowino Jump to: navigation, search Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1921 – June 22, 1996) was an American philosopher and historian of science. His most famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, revolutionized the philosophy of science and has become one of the most cited academic books of all time. His contribution to the philosophy of science marked a break with key positivist doctrines and began a new style of philosophy of science that brought it much closer to the history of science. The general thrust of his book is that science operates on the model of paradigms which are clung to until a scientific revolution or paradigm shift happens. As examples, he used the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, as well as the shift from pre-Darwinian to post-Darwinian biology. "... while Kuhn thus opened up the entire domain of science for political analysis, he argued that the behaviorally visible mark of a truly scientific community was its high degree of autonomy, its ability to exercise authority over its own intellectual affairs. He confirmed the instinct that science was really different. But he also showed that scientists, within their domain, behaved very much like the rest of us." – David Hollinger, writing in the New York Times.[1] [edit] Kuhn's life and career Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He was awarded a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943 graduating summa cum laude, and spent the remaining war years at Harvard researching into radar. He gained a master's degree in 1946, and a PhD in physics in 1949 for a thesis concerned an application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics. From 1948 until 1956 he taught a course in the history of science at Harvard, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department. There, he wrote and published (in 1962), at the age of forty, his major work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Most of his subsequent career was spent in articulating and developing the ideas developed within it. In 1964 he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1978 he published Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 and in 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In 1982 he was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. In 1994 he was diagnosed with cancer of the bronchial tubes; he died in 1996.[2] [edit] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions For more information, see: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (book). [edit] Notes ↑ Paradigms Lost, David Hollinger, writing in the New York Times, May 28, 2000 ↑ Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm The New York Times, June 19, 1996, Obituary By Lawrence Van Gelder; Fullmer JZ (1998) Memorial. Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)Technology and Culture 139:372-7
7992	dbpedia	3	5	https://physicsworld.com/a/thomas-kuhn-new-insights-into-a-revolutionary-philosopher-of-science/	en	Thomas Kuhn: new insights into a revolutionary philosopher of science – Physics World	https://physicsworld.com…_Jackie-Niam.jpg	https://physicsworld.com…_Jackie-Niam.jpg	[ "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/themes/iopp/static/img/iop-publishing-logo-white.png", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/themes/iopp/static/img/svg/logo-culture-history-society.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Astronomy_and_space_164193.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Atomic_and_molecular__774E92.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Biophysics_and_bioengineering__05958E-1.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Condensed_matter__774E92.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Culture.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Environment_and_energy__85AD21-1.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Instrumentation_and_measurement__9D9D9C.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Materials__0085C8.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mathematics_and_computation__EC660F.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Medical_physics__05958.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Optics_and_photonics__774E92.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Particle_and_nuclear__774E92.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/People.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Quantum__774E92.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Enterprise-cogs.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Culture.svg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2024-01-Elia-thinking-man-wireframe-1208397643-iStock_Jackie-Niam-635x462.jpg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/REV-cognition-human-thought-182798622-iStock_adventtr-160x90.jpg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Marketing-tile-311x197.jpg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024-04-Amsen-scientific-thinking-featured-350x197.jpg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2024-08-Ball-Fram-Hall-photo-cast-315x197.jpg", "https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/9-8-24-skateboard-pumping-350x197.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "No Author" ]	2024-01-17T11:00:03+00:00	Gino Elia reviews The Last Writings of Thomas S Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science edited by Bojana Mladenovic	en		Physics World	https://physicsworld.com/a/thomas-kuhn-new-insights-into-a-revolutionary-philosopher-of-science/	In 1962 the philosopher Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book that shook the history of science and laid important groundwork for an entirely new field – the sociology of science. In this contentious volume, Kuhn portrayed scientific revolutions as extended periods of intellectual conflict that he called “extraordinary science”. Older theories, during such times, can no longer account for new phenomena. A famous example of such a revolution is the “ultraviolet catastrophe” of the early 1900s. That was when classical physics predicted that the energy emitted by a black body should increase to infinity as the wavelength of the radiation falls. This prediction disagreed with experiments, which showed the energy peaking before dropping away again, forcing physicists to turn to something entirely new: quantum theory. By emphasizing discontinuity, Kuhn did not think new paradigms have to “fit” or share scientific vocabulary with previous ones. To use his language, he said they are “incommensurable” with each other. In proposing incommensurability, Kuhn was challenging the widely held assumption that scientific knowledge accumulates linearly over time. Instead, he argued, science switches to new paradigms, defined by new concepts, methods and worldviews. Kuhn’s 1962 book initially received a chilly reception. But as the 1960s and 1970s rolled by, it started having a widespread impact on philosophy, history and even political science. Many philosophers took incommensurability to mean that scientific theories just change from one form to another and can’t therefore be compared across paradigms. Kuhn, it seemed, had abandoned the assumption that science progresses to ever-improving states of knowledge. Others said Kuhn’s position smacked of relativism – that our knowledge, in other words, is only true “relative” to our current paradigm. Kuhn’s book was also criticized for seeming to do away with the supremacy of rational argumentation in paradigm shifts. Kuhn describes how it could be rational for scientists to dismiss contradictory evidence by modifying existing theories to fit their beliefs or by rationalizing away exceptions to their point of view. It was a view that prompted some to even accuse Kuhn of introducing “mob psychology” into science. Unfortunately, the basic message of his book was widely misunderstood. Sure, Kuhn was a counterweight to “linearized” narratives of history, but what he really wanted to do was make the notion of progress more nuanced, not discard it altogether. Indeed, in 1969 Kuhn published a postscript to his book, in which he abandoned the term paradigm in favour of “exemplars”. These are concrete, ideal examples such as the “inclined plane” and the “infinite square well”, which students encounter in their education and shape their views about science. He resisted attempts to use rival approaches, such as sociology and psychology, to explain how science progresses. Bojana Mladenovic, a philosopher at Williams College in the US, has done a great service with her new book The Last Writings of Thomas S Kuhn. Containing the unfinished draft of a book that Kuhn was still working on when he died in 1996, Last Writings brings much needed clarity to Kuhn’s philosophy and his understanding of how science develops. The book also includes two previously unpublished papers by Kuhn entitled “Scientific knowledge as historical product” and “The presence of past science”. Kuhn essentially said the only way to model how scientific theories change is to take into account the shared lexicon of concepts and methods of scientists living at the time In her introduction, Mladenovic charts Kuhn’s direction of thinking from the Structure to his unfinished draft, titled Plurality of Worlds: an Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development. As Mladenovic makes clear, Kuhn never entirely gave up the idea of incommensurability, but revised the concept extensively in Plurality of Worlds. Far from reducing science to psychology or sociology, Kuhn essentially said the only way to model how scientific theories change is to take into account the shared lexicon of concepts and methods of scientists living at the time. Historians cannot, for example, compare different theories about the behaviour of waves without examining how the terms “wave”, “sound” and “light” varied in meaning in the 18th and 19th centuries. Similarly, we cannot judge theories of temperature without understanding how the concepts of “hot” and “cold” differed widely among scientists after the invention of the mercury thermometer in 1714. For Kuhn, the ideas that our knowledge about waves or heat simply improved conceals conceptual differences – incommensurability – that resist easy comparisons. As for Kuhn’s essay “The presence of past science”, it offers fairly standard critiques of the “whiggish” approach to history, which essentially judges the past from the point of view of the present. Also known as “presentist” history, it assumes the past has little to tell us about current events. Presentist accounts, in other words, tend to favour historical insights that serve as precursors to “modern” thinking and treat past viewpoints as less advanced than those that followed. Most historians today are aware of the flaws in this approach and in some sense Kuhn’s essay foreshadowed current thinking. Taken together, Last Writings makes clear that Kuhn thought history must deal with its own incommensurability to model progress, which is done by “rediscovering” the achievements of past science. So instead of writing history with the benefit of hindsight, Kuhn’s aim was to reconstruct the intelligibility and the reasoning of scientists at the time. That way, we can see shifts, merits and deficiencies that motivate us to take up one lexicon over another. Kuhn deemed that what was necessary to ground incommensurability is a “theory of meaning” and Plurality of Worlds takes serious steps to flesh out this project. Kuhn veered between the two extremes of historicism and naturalism. Like his fellow philosophers Noam Chomsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein, he believed that human beings perceive and classify nature in similar ways while reflecting distinct cultural inheritance and practices. At the same time, Kuhn’s incommensurability suggests that no two distinct lexicons, even with overlapping terms that appear to describe the same objects, typify nature in the exact same way. The hard road then, and perhaps one worth taking, is to make sense of our common ground without presuming a one-to-one correspondence between terms or trying to translate every statement for a given set of lexicons. In saying that lexicons are distinct but communicable, Kuhn’s goal was ambitious but well-conceived. It’s therefore unfortunate Kuhn never had time to finish his final book because he showed a strong sense of what is needed to answer his own questions about incommensurability. Read more Debate, discover, disseminate: why the ‘iron rule’ of science is so effective The second part of Plurality of Worlds tries to give structure to Kuhn’s theory of meaning by discussing various types of entities using cognitive psychology. In doing so, Kuhn draws a distinction between natural phenomena, like biological taxonomy, and human-made tools, which he dubs “artefactual terms”. He further distinguishes these from physics terms such as “mass”, “extension” and “motion”, which he calls “singletons”. Unlike the informal vocabulary of everyday life, Kuhn regarded singletons as unique, deliberate formalizations in theoretical science. They are law-like generalizations that formalize everyday observations. Kuhn’s choice to label “singletons” as neither purely natural nor artefactual shows promise because he gives meaning to physical terms without taking our models literally or simply regarding them as useful tools for doing calculations. Kuhn was perhaps right that we cannot strip concepts of their lexical context and carelessly judge them from today’s point of view Some may find Kuhn’s notion of incommensurability just as tricky to grasp as when he wrote Structure back in 1962. Despite his revisions, Kuhn still does not think we can say, for example, that Alessandro Volta was wrong about the direction of electrical current, since his notion of “current” differed from present-day usage. But what can we say then? Misreads of relativism aside, Kuhn too often reverts to denying our ability to compare scientific concepts over vast periods of time. Kuhn was perhaps right that we cannot strip concepts of their lexical context and carelessly judge them from today’s point of view. Just think of Aristotle’s notion of “nothingness”, which he called “the void”. We can’t simply mix that idea with our own methods of evaluation. For Aristotle, the non-existence of void was a tautological truth. For us, the existence of the void is a fact about vacuum. However, as far as I can tell, what is missing is a way of translating concepts from one theory to another without losing the original meaning. After all, Aristotle’s notion of void is not a vacuum as we now know it, but surely it corresponds with something from modern science. Granted, Kuhn’s work was unfinished, but hopefully, the Last Writings will reinvigorate conversations about incommensurability for years to come.
7992	dbpedia	1	69	https://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/johann-thomas-kuhn-24-pcdyjv	en	Johann Thomas Kuhn,, born 1785	https://www.ancestrycdn.…-hero-emily2.jpg	https://www.ancestrycdn.…-hero-emily2.jpg	[ "https://www.ancestrycdn.com/ui-static/i/logo/ancestry.svg", "https://www.ancestrycdn.com/astro-seolopp/images/treeGroup-5b239812.png", "https://mediasvc.ancestry.com/v2/image/namespaces/1093/media/3835386f-f61f-43dd-8fa1-7273eba69fcb.jpg?Client=astro-seolopp&MaxSide=160", "https://mediasvc.ancestry.com/v2/image/namespaces/1093/media/966c2a72-670c-44ce-a6b0-b8a7b089bb24.jpg?Client=astro-seolopp&MaxSide=160", "https://mediasvc.ancestry.com/v2/image/namespaces/1093/media/04c1fe94-de08-4eeb-84bb-4d33a1197f00.jpg?Client=astro-seolopp&MaxSide=160", "https://mediasvc.ancestry.com/v2/image/namespaces/1093/media/c065d022-dd4f-40b4-9788-4a93ed58eb5b.jpg?Client=astro-seolopp&MaxSide=160", "https://mediasvc.ancestry.com/v2/image/namespaces/1093/media/eb2d0f53-c823-49cd-8e44-ba0dfe201579.jpg?Client=astro-seolopp&MaxSide=160", "https://mediasvc.ancestry.com/v2/image/namespaces/1093/media/5532c293-3f6e-44a0-8f41-90f7c1435cb2.jpg?Client=astro-seolopp&MaxSide=160", "https://mediasvc.ancestry.com/v2/image/namespaces/1093/media/a0da4927-d348-4460-99a4-d0f0c498fdd6.jpg?Client=astro-seolopp&MaxSide=160" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Johann Thomas Kuhn born 1785 in Hatzfeld, Hungary genealogy record - Ancestry®.	en	https://www.ancestrycdn.com/astro-seolopp/assets/favicon-8bf6a704.ico		https://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/results?firstName=johann&lastName=kuhn	Public Member Trees This database contains family trees submitted to Ancestry by users who have indicated that their tree can be viewed by all Ancestry subscribers.These trees can change over time as users edit, remove, or otherwise modify the data in their trees. You can contact the owner of the tree to get more information. Private Member Trees This database contains family trees submitted to Ancestry by users who have indicated that their tree can only be viewed by Ancestry members to whom they have granted permission to see their tree.These trees can change over time as users edit, remove, or otherwise modify the data in their trees. If you would like to view one of these trees in its entirety, you can contact the owner of the tree to request permission to see the tree.
7992	dbpedia	0	25	https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4735497.Thomas_S_Kuhn	en	Thomas S. 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Kuhn", "Stefano Gattei (Redattore)", "James Conant (Editor)", "John Haugeland (Editor)", "José Roma Feito (Translator)", "Manuel Cruz (Series Editor)", "Bojana Mladenovic (Editor)" ]	null	About Thomas S. Kuhn: American historian and philosopher of science, a leading contributor to the change of focus in the philosophy and sociology of scie...				https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4735497.Thomas_S_Kuhn	The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 4.03 avg rating — 27,711 ratings — published 1962 — 188 editions The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought 4.12 avg rating — 820 ratings — published 1957 — 53 editions The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change 4.03 avg rating — 145 ratings — published 1977 — 19 editions The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview by James Conant (Editor), John Haugeland (Editor) 4.04 avg rating — 121 ratings — published 1993 — 10 editions Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 4.30 avg rating — 47 ratings — published 1978 — 6 editions ¿Qué son las revoluciones científicas? y otros ensayos by Manuel Cruz (Series Editor) 3.68 avg rating — 25 ratings — published 1987 The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science 3.45 avg rating — 11 ratings — published 1992 Sources for History of Quantum Physics 3.75 avg rating — 8 ratings — 2 editions The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science by Bojana Mladenovic (Editor) 4.14 avg rating — 7 ratings — 5 editions
7992	dbpedia	3	27	https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/19/us/thomas-kuhn-73-devised-science-paradigm.html	en	Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm	https://static01.nyt.com…op.png?year=1996	https://static01.nyt.com…op.png?year=1996	[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Lawrence Van Gelder", "www.nytimes.com", "lawrence-van-gelder" ]	1996-06-19T00:00:00		en	/vi-assets/static-assets/favicon-d2483f10ef688e6f89e23806b9700298.ico		https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/19/us/thomas-kuhn-73-devised-science-paradigm.html	Thomas S. Kuhn, whose theory of scientific revolution became a profoundly influential landmark of 20th-century intellectual history, died on Monday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 73. Robert DiIorio, associate director of the news office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the scholar, who held the title of professor emeritus at M.I.T., had been ill with cancer in recent years. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," was conceived while Professor Kuhn was a graduate student in theoretical physics and published as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science before the University of Chicago Press issued it as a 180-page book in 1962. The work punctured the widely held notion that scientific change was a strictly rational process. Professor's Kuhn's treatise influenced not only scientists but also economists, historians, sociologists and philosophers, touching off considerable debate. It has sold about one million copies in 16 languages and remains required reading in many basic courses in the history and philosophy of science. Dr. Kuhn, a professor of philosophy and history of science at M.I.T. from 1979 to 1983 and the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy there from 1983 until 1991, was the author or co-author of five books and scores of articles on the philosophy and history of science. But Dr. Kuhn remained best known for "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." His thesis was that science was not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead, he wrote, it is "a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions." And in those revolutions, he wrote, "one conceptual world view is replaced by another." Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
7992	dbpedia	2	10	https://louis.pressbooks.pub/introphilosophy/chapter/reading-3-philosophy-of-science-and-technology/	en	Thomas Kuhn – The Priority of Paradigms – Readings in Western Philosophy for Louisiana Learners	https://louis.pressbooks…avicon-32x32.png	https://louis.pressbooks…avicon-32x32.png	[ "https://louis.pressbooks.pub/app/uploads/2021/07/cropped-cropped-logo_simple.png", "https://louis.pressbooks.pub/app/uploads/sites/54/2023/06/Thomas-Kuhn-232x300.jpg", "https://louis.pressbooks.pub/app/themes/pressbooks-book/packages/buckram/assets/images/cc-by-nc-sa.svg", "https://louis.pressbooks.pub/app/themes/pressbooks-book/assets/images/yt_icon_mono_dark.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Jeff McLaughlin" ]	2024-01-01T00:00:00		en	https://louis.pressbooks…e-touch-icon.png		https://louis.pressbooks.pub/introphilosophy/chapter/reading-3-philosophy-of-science-and-technology/	23 Biography of Thomas Kuhn Vol. II, No. 2 44 The Priority of Paradigms (Note: Materials are included on the basis of fair use as described in the Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Open Education.) What need we know, Wittgenstein asked, in order that we apply terms like ‘chair,’ or ‘leaf,’ or ‘game’ unequivocally and without provoking argument?2 That question is very old and has generally been answered by saying that we must know, consciously or intuitively, what a chair, or leaf, or game is. We must, that is, grasp some set of attributes that all games and that only games have in common. Wittgenstein, however, concluded that, given the way we use language and the sort of world to which we apply it, there need be no such set of characteristics. Though a discussion of some of the attributes shared by a number of games or chairs or leaves often helps us learn how to employ the corresponding term, there is no set of characteristics that is simultaneously applicable to all members of the class and to them alone. Instead, confronted with a previously unobserved activity, we apply the term ‘game’ because what we are seeing bears a close “family resemblance” to a number of the activities that we have previously learned to call by that name. For Wittgenstein, in short, games, and chairs, and leaves are natural families, each constituted by a network of overlapping and crisscross resemblances. The existence of such a network sufficiently accounts for our success in identifying the corresponding object or activity. Only if the families we named overlapped and merged gradually into one another—only, that is, if there were no natural families—would our success in identifying and naming provide evidence for a set of common characteristics corresponding to each of the class names we employ. Something of the same sort may very well hold for the various research problems and techniques that arise within a single normal scientific tradition. What these have in common is not that they satisfy some explicit or even some fully discoverable set of rules and assumptions that gives the tradition its character and its hold upon the scientific mind. Instead, they may relate by resemblance and by modeling to one or another part of the scientific corpus which the community in question already recognizes as among its established achievements. Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subsequent exposure to the literature often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms. And because they do so, they need no full set of rules. The coherence displayed by the research tradition in which they participate may not imply even the existence of an underlying body of rules and assumptions that additional historical or philosophical investigation might uncover. That scientists do not usually ask or debate what makes a particular problem or solution legitimate tempts us to suppose that, at least intuitively, they know the answer. But it may only indicate that neither the question nor the answer is felt to be relevant to their research. Paradigms may be prior to, more binding, and more complete than any set of rules for research that could be unequivocally abstracted from them. So far this point has been entirely theoretical: paradigms could determine normal science without the intervention of discoverable rules. Let me now try to increase both its clarity and urgency by indicating some of the reasons for believing that paradigms actually do operate in this manner. The first, which has already been discussed quite fully, is the severe difficulty of discovering the rules that have guided particular normal-scientific traditions. That difficulty is very nearly the same as the one the philosopher encounters when he tries to say what all games have in common. The second, to which the first is really a corollary, is rooted in the nature of scientific education. Scientists, it should already be clear, never learn concepts, laws, and theories in the abstract and by themselves. Instead, these intellectual tools are from the start encountered in a historically and pedagogically prior unit that displays them with and through their applications. A new theory is always announced together with applications to some concrete range of natural phenomena; without them it would not be even a candidate for acceptance. After it has been accepted, those same applications or others accompany the theory into the textbooks from which the future practitioner will learn his trade. They are not there merely as embroidery or even as documentation. On the contrary, the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory. If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like ‘force,’ ‘mass,’ ‘space,’ and ‘time,’ he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution. That process of learning by finger exercise or by doing continues throughout the process of professional initiation. As the student proceeds from his freshman course to and through his doctoral dissertation, the problems assigned to him become more complex and less completely precedented. But they continue to be closely modeled on previous achievements as are the problems that normally occupy him during his subsequent independent scientific career. One is at liberty to suppose that somewhere along the way the scientist has intuitively abstracted rules of the game for himself, but there is little reason to believe it. Though many scientists talk easily and well about the particular individual hypotheses that underlie a concrete piece of current research, they are little better than laymen at characterizing the established bases of their field, its legitimate problems and methods. If they have learned such abstractions at all, they show it mainly through their ability to do successful research. That ability can, however, be understood without recourse to hypothetical rules of the game. These consequences of scientific education have a converse that provides a third reason to suppose that paradigms guide research by direct modeling as well as through abstracted rules. Normal science can proceed without rules only so long as the relevant scientific community accepts without question the particular problem-solutions already achieved. Rules should therefore become important and the characteristic unconcern about them should vanish whenever paradigms or models are felt to be insecure. That is, moreover, exactly what does occur. The pre-paradigm period, in particular, is regularly marked by frequent and deep debates over legitimate methods, problems, and standards of solution, though these serve rather to define schools than to produce agreement. We have already noted a few of these debates in optics and electricity, and they played an even larger role in the development of seventeenth-century chemistry and of early nineteenth-century geology.3 Furthermore, debates like these do not vanish once and for all with the appearance of a paradigm. Though almost non-existent during periods of normal science, they recur regularly just before and during scientific revolutions, the periods when paradigms are first under attack and then subject to change. The transition from Newtonian to quantum mechanics evoked many debates about both the nature and the standards of physics, some of which still continue.4 There are people alive today who can remember the similar arguments engendered by Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory and by statistical mechanics.5 And earlier still, the assimilation of Galileo’s and Newton’s mechanics gave rise to a particularly famous series of debates with Aristotelians, Cartesians, and Leibnizians about the standards legitimate to science.6 When scientists disagree about whether the fundamental problems of their field have been solved, the search for rules gains a function that it does not ordinarily possess. While paradigms remain secure, however, they can function without agreement over rationalization or without any attempted rationalization at all. A fourth reason for granting paradigms a status prior to that of shared rules and assumptions can conclude this section. The introduction to this essay suggested that there can be small revolutions as well as large ones, that some revolutions affect only the members of a professional subspecialty, and that for such groups even the discovery of a new and unexpected phenomenon may be revolutionary. The next section will introduce selected revolutions of that sort, and it is still far from clear how they can exist. If normal science is so rigid and if scientific communities are so close-knit as the preceding discussion has implied, how can a change of paradigm ever affect only a small subgroup? What has been said so far may have seemed to imply that normal science is a single monolithic and unified enterprise that must stand or fall with any one of its paradigms as well as with all of them together. But science is obviously seldom or never like that. Often, viewing all fields together, it seems instead a rather ramshackle structure with little coherence among its various parts. Nothing said to this point should, however, conflict with that very familiar observation. On the contrary, substituting paradigms for rules should make the diversity of scientific fields and specialties easier to understand. Explicit rules, when they exist, are usually common to a very broad scientific group, but paradigms need not be. The practitioners of widely separated fields, say astronomy and taxonomic botany, are educated by exposure to quite different achievements described in very different books. And even men who, being in the same or in closely related fields, begin by studying many of the same books and achievements may acquire rather different paradigms in the course of professional specialization. Consider, for a single example, the quite large and diverse community constituted by all physical scientists. Each member of that group today is taught the laws of, say, quantum mechanics, and most of them employ these laws at some point in their research or teaching. But they do not all learn the same applications of these laws, and they are not therefore all affected in the same ways by changes in quantum-mechanical practice. On the road to professional specialization, a few physical scientists encounter only the basic principles of quantum mechanics. Others study in detail the paradigm applications of these principles to chemistry, still others to the physics of the solid state, and so on. What quantum mechanics means to each of them depends upon what courses he has had, what texts he has read, and which journals he studies. It follows that, though a change in quantum-mechanical law will be revolutionary for all of these groups, a change that reflects only on one or another of the paradigm applications of quantum mechanics need be revolutionary only for the members of a particular professional subspecialty. For the rest of the profession and for those who practice other physical sciences, that change need not be revolutionary at all. In short, though quantum mechanics (or Newtonian dynamics, or electromagnetic theory) is a paradigm for many scientific groups, it is not the same paradigm for them all. Therefore, it can simultaneously determine several traditions of normal science that overlap without being coextensive. A revolution produced within one of these traditions will not necessarily extend to the others as well. One brief illustration of specialization’s effect may give this whole series of points additional force. An investigator who hoped to learn something about what scientists took the atomic theory to be asked a distinguished physicist and an eminent chemist whether a single atom of helium was or was not a molecule. Both answered without hesitation, but their answers were not the same. For the chemist the atom of helium was a molecule because it behaved like one with respect to the kinetic theory of gases. For the physicist, on the other hand, the helium atom was not a molecule because it displayed no molecular spectrum.7 Presumably both men were talking of the same particle, but they were viewing it through their own research training and practice. Their experience in problem-solving told them what a molecule must be. Undoubtedly their experiences had had much in common, but they did not, in this case, tell the two specialists the same thing. As we proceed we shall discover how consequential paradigm differences of this sort can occasionally be. Notes 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York, 1953), pp. 31–36. Wittgenstein, however, says almost nothing about the sort of world necessary to support the naming procedure he outlines. Part of the point that follows cannot therefore be attributed to him. 3 For chemistry, see H. Metzger, Les doctrines chimiques en France du début du XVII e à la fin du XVIII e siècle (Paris, 1923), pp. 24–27, 146–49; and Marie Boas, Robert Boyle and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry (Cambridge, 1958), chap. ii. For geology, see Walter F. Cannon, “The Uniformitarian-Catastrophist Debate,” Isis 51 (1960), 38–55; and C. C. Gillispie, Genesis and Geology (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), chaps, iv–v. 4 For controversies over quantum mechanics, see Jean Ullmo, La crise de la physique quantique (Paris, 1950), chap. II. 5 For statistical mechanics, see René Dugas, La théorie physique au sens de Boltzmann et ses prolongements modernes (Neuchatel, 1959), pp. 158–84, 206–19. For the reception of Maxwell’s work, see Max Planck, “Maxwell’s Influence in Germany,” in James Clerk Maxwell: A Commemoration Volume, 1831–1931 (Cambridge, 1931), pp. 45–65, esp. pp. 58– 63; and Silvanus P. Thompson, The Life of William Thomson Baron Kelvin of Largs (London, 1910), II, 1021–27. 6 For a sample of the battle with the Aristotelians, see A. Koyré, “A Documentary History of the Problem of Fall from Kepler to Newton,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, XLV (1955), 329–95. For the debates with the Cartesians and Leibnizians, see Pierre Brunet, L’introduction des théories de Newton en France au XVII e siècle (Paris, 1931); and A. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, 1957), chap. XI. 7 The investigator was James K. Senior, to whom I am indebted for a verbal report. Some related issues are treated in his paper, “The Vernacular of the Laboratory,” Philosophy of Science, XXV (1958), 163–68.
7992	dbpedia	1	12	https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/19/us/thomas-kuhn-73-devised-science-paradigm.html	en	Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm	https://static01.nyt.com…op.png?year=1996	https://static01.nyt.com…op.png?year=1996	[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Lawrence Van Gelder", "www.nytimes.com", "lawrence-van-gelder" ]	1996-06-19T00:00:00		en	/vi-assets/static-assets/favicon-d2483f10ef688e6f89e23806b9700298.ico		https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/19/us/thomas-kuhn-73-devised-science-paradigm.html	Thomas S. Kuhn, whose theory of scientific revolution became a profoundly influential landmark of 20th-century intellectual history, died on Monday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 73. Robert DiIorio, associate director of the news office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the scholar, who held the title of professor emeritus at M.I.T., had been ill with cancer in recent years. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," was conceived while Professor Kuhn was a graduate student in theoretical physics and published as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science before the University of Chicago Press issued it as a 180-page book in 1962. The work punctured the widely held notion that scientific change was a strictly rational process. Professor's Kuhn's treatise influenced not only scientists but also economists, historians, sociologists and philosophers, touching off considerable debate. It has sold about one million copies in 16 languages and remains required reading in many basic courses in the history and philosophy of science. Dr. Kuhn, a professor of philosophy and history of science at M.I.T. from 1979 to 1983 and the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy there from 1983 until 1991, was the author or co-author of five books and scores of articles on the philosophy and history of science. But Dr. Kuhn remained best known for "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." His thesis was that science was not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead, he wrote, it is "a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions." And in those revolutions, he wrote, "one conceptual world view is replaced by another." Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
7992	dbpedia	0	48	https://www.philsci.com/book6.htm	en	Century Philosophy of Science: Book 6			[ "https://www.philsci.com/images/logo.gif", "https://www.philsci.com/images/innerHome.gif", "https://www.philsci.com/images/innerB9.gif", "https://www.philsci.com/images/innerB1.gif", "https://www.philsci.com/images/innerB2.gif", "https://www.philsci.com/images/innerB3.gif", "https://www.philsci.com/images/innerB4.gif", "https://www.philsci.com/images/innerB5.gif", "https://www.philsci.com/images/innerB6_ov.gif", "https://www.philsci.com/images/innerB7.gif", "https://www.philsci.com/images/innerB8.gif", "https://www.philsci.com/images/innerbib.gif", "https://www.philsci.com/images/getpdf2.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Philosophy of Science,Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Introduction to Philosophy of Science,Artificial Intelligence, Pragmatism, Scientific Discovery , Herbert Simon, Paul Thagard, Philosophy of Language,Willard Van Quine,Semantics,Rudolf Carnap, Scientific Theory,Philosophy of Social Science,Philosophy of Sociology,Philosophy of Economics , Philosophy of Econometrics, Philosophy of Physics, Positivism,, Romanticism, Aim of Science, Scientific, Criticism , Scientific Explanation, Scientific Law, Karl Popper, Werner Heisenberg, Quantum Theory, Thomas Kuhn, Russell Hanson, Paul Feyerabend, Talcott Parsons, Max Weber, Ernst Mach, Albert Einstein, Carl Hempel, Niels Bohr, John Sonquist, Pierre Duhem, David Bohm, Trygve Haavelmo, James Conant, Thomas Hickey				null	THOMAS KUHN ON REVOLUTION AND PAUL FEYERABEND ON ANARCHY BOOK VI - Page 1 This BOOK focuses on Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabendâs wholistic variations on the contextual or artifactual thesis of relativized semantics. The classical pragmatists recognized the philosophical significance of the phenomenon of belief. But belief has taken on a much greater importance in contemporary pragmatism, where a universally quantified descriptive discourse believed to be true (what Quine calls the âweb of beliefâ) constitutes a context that controls the semantics and thus ontology of descriptive discourse. This is the contextual or artifactual thesis of relativized semantics. Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabendâs variants of this artifactual thesis of the semantics of language led these two philosophers as well as others to propose new roles for the phenomenon of prejudicial belief in the history and dynamics of scientific development. Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He received a Bachelor of Science degree summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1943. His first exposure to history of science came as an assistant to James B. Conant in a course designed to present science to nonscientists. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1949, and has since taught history of science at Harvard University, at the University of California at Berkeley (1961), at Princeton University (1964) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979). A transcript of an autobiographical interview is reprinted in The Road Since Structure (2000). Paul K. Feyerabend (1924-1994) was born in Vienna, Austria. He was inducted into the Austrian army during World War II, and was wounded in a retreat from the advanÂcing Russian army in 1945. After the war he studied theater at the Wiemar Institute, and then went to the University of Vienna, where he received a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1951. He then went to England and studied under Popper, whose views he later rejected. He immigrated to the United States in 1959, and for the remainder of his career was at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1993 he wrote a brief autobiography titled Killing Time. The story of the historical approach in twentieth-century philosophy of science, however, begins with Conant. Conant on Prejudice and The Dynamic View of Science James B. Conant (1883-1978) is the principal influence on the professional thinking of Kuhn. Kuhn dedicated his Structure of Scientific Revolutions to Conant, âWho Started Itâ, and Conant acknowledged Kuhnâs contributions to the âCase Histories in Experimental Scienceâ course that Conant started at Harvard University. Conant received his doctorate in chemistry at Harvard in 1916, and then taught chemistry at Harvard from 1919 to 1933, when he accepted an appointment as the universityâs president. In 1953 he resigned his position at Harvard to accept an appointment as U.S. High Commissioner of the Federal Republic of Germany and then later as U.S. Ambassador to Germany. In 1970 he wrote My Several Lives: Memoirs Of A Social Inventor, an autobiography describing these three phases of his profesÂsional life. Conantâs views on the history and nature of science are set forth in a series of books. The earliest is his On Understanding Science: An Historical Approach (1947), which he later expanded into Science And Common Sense (1951). A year later he published Modern Science And Modern Man (1952), which contains âThe Changing Scientific Scene: 1900-1950â in which he elaborates his âskeptical approachâ to modern quantum theory. In 1964 he published Two Modes Of Thought, which contains several references to Kuhnâs Structure of Scientific Revolutions in context supportive of Kuhnâs famous thesis. Conant advocates what he calls the âdynamic viewâ of science, and he contrasts it with the âstatic viewâ, which he identifies with the positivist philosophy and specificalÂly with the philosophy set forth by Karl Pearson in the latÂterâs Grammar of Science. The static view represents science as a systematic body of knowledge, while the dynamic view represents science as an ongoing and continuing activity. On the dynamic view the present state of knowledge is of importance chiefly as a basis for further research activity. Conant defines science as an interconnected series of concepts and conceptual schemes that have developed as a result of experimentation, and that are fruitful of further experimentation and observations. He explicitly rejects positivism, which he portrays as a quest for certainty, and he emphasizes that science is a speculative enterprise that is successful only to the degree that it is continuing. Conant also maintains what he calls his âskepticalâ view. On this view microphysical theory does not actually describe reality, but rather is a âpolicyâ that serves as a guide for fruitful future research activity. He maintains that the wave-particle duality thesis in the quantum theory has changed the attitude of physicists, such that science is now viewed in terms of âconceptual schemesâ, which arise from experiment and are fruitful of more experiments. The wave-particle duality is one such conceptual scheme, and it justifies his âskepticalâ approach, because this conceptual scheme does not describe what light âreallyâ is. Instead modern physics describes the properties of light and formuÂlates them on the simplest possible principles. The history of science is a history of the succession of such conceptual schemes. Conant references the view of the Harvard pragmatist philosopher, William James, who maintained that manâs intellectual life consists almost wholly in the substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order from which experience originally comes. Different universes of thought arise as concepts and percepts interpenetrate and âmeltâ together, âimpregnateâ and âfertilizeâ each other. As a result the series of conceptual schemes in the history of science is one in which the conceptual schemes are of increasing adequacy to the perceptions in experimentation. Conant had initially believed that natural sciences have an accumulative character that reveals progress, but following Kuhnâs Structure of Scientific RevoluÂtions (1962) Conant modified his view of the accumulative nature of science. He continues to find accumulative progress in the empirical-inductive generalizations in science and also in the practical arts, but he excludes accumulative progress from the theoretical-deductive method, which admits to scientific revolutions. Conant identifies the static view with the logical perspective, while he admits the psychological and the socioloÂgical perspectives in his dynamic view. The sociological perspective reveals that science is a living organization, which exists due to close communication that enables new ideas to spread rapidly, and that enables discoveries to breed more discoveries. Scientists pool their information, and by so doing they start a process of cross-fertilization in the realm of ideas. As a social phenomenon, science is a recent invention starting with the scientific societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then evolving in the universities in the nineteenth century. Communication was initially through letters, then later through books, and now through journals. He maintains that historically one of the more important psychological aspects of the development of science is prejudice, a matter toward which he admits he himself has an ambivalent attitude. On the one hand the traditions of modern science, the instruments, the high degree of specialization, the crowd of witnesses that surround the scientist â all these things exert pressures that make impartiality in matters of science almost automatic. If the scientist deviates from the rigorous rÃ´le of impartial experiment or observation, he does so at his peril. On the other hand Conant says that to put the scientist on a pedestal because he is an impartial inquirer is to misunderstand the historical situation. This misunderstanding results both from the dogmatic character of textbooks and from the view of positivist philosophers such as Karl Pearson. Conant emphasizes the stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists of every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observation, misleading generalization, inadequate formulations and unconscious prejudice. He notes that these problems are rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks and by those who expound on âtheâ scientific method. Conant exhibits his thesis in his description of the chemical revolution, in which the phlogiston theory of combustion was replaced by the theory of oxygen. He notes that for one-hundred fifty years an anomaly to the phlogiston theory, the fact the a calx weighs more than its metal, was known to exist, but that the theory itself was never called into question until a better one was developed to take its place, namely Lavoisierâs new conceptual scheme. In the meanwhile the phlogiston theory was an obstruction to the development of the new conceptual scheme, as scientists attempted to reconcile the anomaly to the phlogiston theory. Conant also notes that even after the new conceptual scheme was advanced to overthrow the phlogiston scheme, there continued to be debate, and that the proponents of the new conceptual scheme were no more shaken by a few alleged facts contrary to the new scheme, than were the advocates of the old scheme by facts anomalous to the earlier scheme. Lavoisier pursued his conceptual scheme in spite of embarrassing experimental findings, which only after his death were found to be erroneous findings. Conantâs thesis in this examination of the chemical revolution is that both sides in the controversy had put aside experimental evidence that did not fit into their respective conceptual schemes. And in his view what is most significant is the frequent fact that subsequent history may show that such arbitrary dismissal of âthe truthâ is quite justified. He concludes that to suppose that a scientific theory stands or falls on the issue of one experiment is to misunderstand science entirely. Conant characterizes the first fifty years of the nineteenth century that culminated in the chemistsâ atomic theory of matter, as a period of âthe conflict of prejudicesâ. He notes that one who is not familiar with this episode in the history of science will be amazed to discover that all the relevant ideas and all the basic data for the atomic theory were at hand almost from the outset of the nineteenth century. An analysis of the arguments, pro and con, shows that certain preconceived ideas then current among scientists blocked its development. Still, Conant rejects the view that the scientific way of thinking requires the habit of facing reality quite unprejudiced by any earlier conceptions. In his Science and Common Sense he admits that prejudices are emotional and nonlogical reactions. Yet he also maintains that every scientist must carry with him the scientific prejudices of his day â the many vague, half-formulated assumptions which to him seem âcommon senseâ. Apparently as a result of his acceptance of prejudice as an inevitable fact in the dynamics of science, Conant unabashedly declares that his dynamic view of science is his âprejudiceâ, and adds that he makes âno attempt to conceal itâ. It may be said that one of the differences between Kuhn and Conant is that the latter regards prejudice as merely an inescapable fact in the history of science, while the former regards it as having a contributing function that is inherent in the dynamics of science. In Kuhnâs doctrine of ânormal scienceâ, what Conant calls âprejudiceâ, Kuhn calls by the less pejorative phrase âparadigm consensusâ. But unlike Conant, Kuhn does not view prejudice as merely an individual phenomenon with one scientist taking one prejudice and another taking some alternative prejudice. In Kuhnâs view paradigm consensus is a sociological-semantical phenomenon, and this semantical perspective did not come from Conant. In spite of Conantâs dynamic view including reference to William James about percepts being impregnated with concepts, Conantâs view of the semantics of language is not dynamic. His static view of semantics led him to his âskeptical approachâ, just as it likewise led Bohr to his instrumental view of the formalisms of quantum physics, and for the same reason: without a theory of semantical change, neither Bohr nor Conant could admit a realistic interpretation to the wave-particle duality of the modern quantum theory. While Conant was a very important influence on Kuhn, Kuhn also has his own personal formative intellectual experience, which he calls his âAristotle experienceâ and which he says is responsible for much that is distinctive and original in his thinking. Kuhnâs âAristotle Experienceâ Most of the twentieth-century philosophers of science who have made influential contributions have been inspired by their reflections on the spectacular developments in twentieth-century physics, notably relativity theory and quantum theory. However, Kuhn reports that his intellectually formative experience was inspired by his reading Aristotleâs Physics, and he calls this moment of inspiration his âAristotle experience.â His principal account of this experience is published in his âWhat are Scientific Revolutions?â (1987), and mention is also made in his 1995 autobiographical interview published in Neusis: Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (1997), which is also published in an edited version as âA Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhnâ in The Road Since Structure (2000) along with a reprint of âWhat are Scientific Revolutions?â Kuhnâs âAristotle experienceâ was occasioned by his reading the physics texts of Aristotle in 1947 as a graduate student in physics at Harvard University, in order to prepare a case study on the development of mechanics for James B. Conantâs course in science for nonscientists. Kuhn reports that he approached Aristotleâs texts with the Newtonian mechanics in mind, and that he hoped to answer the question of how much mechanics Aristotle himself had known and how much he had left for people like Galileo and Newton to discover. And he states that having brought to the texts the question formulated in that manner, he rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all, and that everything was left for his successors to discover later. Specifically on the topic of motion Aristotleâs writings seemed to be full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation. Kuhn reports that this conclusion was disturbing for him, since Aristotle had been admired as a great logician and was an astute naturalistic observer. Kuhn then asked himself whether or not the fault was his own rather than Aristotleâs, because Aristotleâs words had not meant to Aristotle and his contemporaries what they mean today to Kuhn and his own contemporaries. Kuhn describes his reconsideration of Aristotleâs Physics: He reports that he continued to puzzle over the text while he was sitting at his desk gazing abstractly out the window of his room with the text of Aristotleâs Physics open before him, when suddenly the conceptual fragments in his head sorted themselves out in a new way and fell into place together to present Aristotle as a very good physicist but of a sort that Kuhn had never dreamed possible. Statements that had previously seemed egregious mistakes afterward seemed at worst near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition. Kuhn then inverted the historical order; he made his account of scientific revolution describe what Aristotelian natural philosophers needed to reach Newtonian ideas instead of what he, a Newtonian reading Aristotleâs text, needed to reach the ideas of the Aristotelian natural philosophers. Thus he maintains that experiences like his Aristotle experience, in which the pieces suddenly sort themselves out and come together in a new way, is the first general characteristic of revolutionary change in science. He states that though scientific revolutions leave much mopping up to do, the central change cannot be experienced piecemeal, one step at a time, but that it involves some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some part of the flux of experience sorts itself out differently and displays patterns that had not been visible previously. Kuhnâs theory of scientific revolutions sparked by his âAristotle experienceâ has been called wholistic (or âholisticâ). The transition as experienced is synthetic, and Kuhn views it as all of a piece, as it were, denying that it can be understood âpiecemealâ. In his Structure of Scientific Revolutions he labeled the synthetic character of the revolutionary transitional experience with the phrase âgestalt switch.â But after receiving much criticism from many philosophers of science he eventually attempted a semantical analysis of scientific revolutions. But before Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), there was his Copernican Revolution, which offers little or no suggestion of his conclusions from his âAristotle experience.â Yet later his examples for semantical analysis routinely come from his Copernican Revolution, and seldom come from Aristotleâs texts. Consider next Kuhnâs views of the historic scientific revolution that benchmarks the beginning of modern science. Kuhn on the Copernican Revolution Kuhnâs influential and popular Structure of Scientific Revolutions was preceded by his Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought in 1957. The earlier work is less philosophical, and it reveals the influence of Conant. The Copernican Revolution contains some ideas that reappear in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. One idea is the central feature of scientific revolutions, that old theories are replaced by new and incompatible ones. In the later book this thesis is elaborated in semantical terms, and it is the basis for his describing scientific revolutions as ânoncumulativeâ episodes in the history of science. Kuhn says in his autobiographical interview written years later, that the noncumulative nature of revolutions was the result of his 1947 âAristotle experience.â However, in the 1957 Copernican Revolution his semantical view is that scientific observations are indifferent to the conceptual schemes that constitute theories, and that observations must be distinguished from interpretations of the data that go beyond the data, such that two astronomers can agree perfectly about the results of observation and yet disagree emphatically about issues such as the reality of the apparent motion of the stars. He states that observations in themselves have no direct consequences for the cosmological theory. No positivist would object to these statements. Later, however, he maintains instead that observations depend on the particular theory held by the scientist, a distinctively post-positivist thesis. Thus in his âWhat are Scientific Revolutions?â (1987) he states that the transition from the Ptolemaic view to the Copernican one involved not only changes in laws of nature like the development of Boyleâs gas laws, but also involved changes in the criteria by which some terms in the laws attach to nature, i.e., it involved meaning changes, and that the criteria are in part dependent upon the theory containing those terms. Thus in the Ptolemaic theory the terms âsunâ and âmoonâ refer to planets and âearthâ does not, while in the Copernican theory âsunâ and âmoonâ are not referenced as planets and the earth is referenced as a planet like Mars and Jupiter, thereby making the two theories not just incompatible, but what he calls semantically âincommensurableâ. Nonetheless, as he develops his semantical views over the years, he maintains that astronomers holding either theory can somehow pick out the same referents and identify those celestial bodies, which are described differently in the two contrary theories. A second idea reappearing in the 1962 book is his thesis that the âlogicâ of science does not completely control the development of science. The logic that he has in mind is a stereotype of Popperâs view, that the occurrence of just one single observation which is incompatible with a theory, dictates that the scientist reject the theory as wrong and abandon it for some other one to replace the wrong one. Kuhn believes that the incompatibility between theory and observation is the ultimate source for the occurrence of scientific revolutions, but he also maintains that historically the process is never so simple, because scientists do not surrender their beliefs so easily. What was to Copernicus a stretching and patching to solve the problem of the planets for the two-sphere theory, was to his predecessors a natural process of adaptation and extension. Kuhn therefore finds in the history of science what he calls âthe problem of scientific beliefsâ: Why do scientists hold to theories despite discrepancies, and then having held to them in these circumstances, why do they later give them up? The significance that Kuhn gives to this phenomenon reveals the influence of Conant. The âproblem of scientific beliefsâ is the same as what Conant meant by the phenomenon of âprejudiceâ. Typically historians and philosophers of science did not consider this phenomenon as having any contributing rÃ´le in the development of science, because it is contrary to the received concept of the programmatic aim of science. And in 1957 Kuhn was clearly as ambivalent in his attitude toward the problem of scientific belief as Conant was toward the phenomenon of prejudice in science. In the 1957 book Kuhn locates part of the reason for the problem of scientific belief in the scientistâs education, a reason that he also calls âthe bandwagon effectâ. This reason is carried forward into the 1962 book, where it has a very important place. In the 1957 book, however, he considers it to be of secondary importance. The other and more important part of the reason in the 1957 book is the interdependence of other areas of the culture with the scientific specialty. The astronomer in the time of Copernicus could not upset the two-sphere universe without overturning physics and religion as well. Fundamental concepts in the pre-Copernican astronomy had become strands for a much larger fabric of thought, and the nonastronomical strands in turn bound the thinking of the astronomers. The Copernican revolution occurred because Copernicus was a dedicated specialist, who valued mathematical and celestial detail more than the values reinforced by the nonastronomical views that were dependent on the prevailing two-sphere theory. This purely technical focus of Copernicus enabled him to ignore the nonastronomical consequences of his innovation, consequences that would lead his contemporaries of less restricted vision to reject his innovation as absurd. In his 1962 book Structure of Scientific Revolutions, however, Kuhn does not make the consequences to the nonspecialist an aspect of his general theory of scientific revolutions. Instead he maintains that scientists persist in their belief in theories with observaÂtional discrepancies for reasons entirely internal to the specialty.
7992	dbpedia	1	7	https://blog.oup.com/2019/11/thomas-kuhn-paradigm-shift-philosopher-of-the-month/	en	Thomas Kuhn and the paradigm shift – Philosopher of the Month	https://oupblog.wpengine…ured-image-1.jpg	https://oupblog.wpengine…ured-image-1.jpg	[ "https://oupblog.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/themes/oup-blog-usa//images/oup-logo.png", "https://oupblog.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Kuhn_Featured-image-1.jpg", "https://oupblog.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/OUP-Philosophy-Crest-184x184.jpeg", "https://oupblog.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/dil-F35EmcotWPY-unsplashedit-1-744x286.jpg", "https://oupblog.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/themes/oup-blog-usa//images/oup-logo-footer.png?ts=5" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "OUPblog Editor" ]	2019-11-14T10:30:49+00:00	Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922–d. 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science best-known for his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) which influenced social sciences and theories of knowledge. He is widely considered one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.	en		OUPblog	https://blog.oup.com/2019/11/thomas-kuhn-paradigm-shift-philosopher-of-the-month/	Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science best-known for his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which influenced social sciences and theories of knowledge. He is widely considered one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Kuhn was born in in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Samuel Lewis Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He obtained his Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and PhD in physics from Harvard University. While completing his PhD, he worked as a teaching assistant for Harvard President James B. Conant, who designed and taught the general education history of science courses. This experience allowed Kuhn to switch from physics to the study of the history and philosophy of science. From 1948 until 1956, Kuhn taught a course in the history of science at Harvard. Subsequently he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, then at Princeton University, and finally at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) where from 1982 until the end of his academic career in 1991 he was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn challenged the prevailing philosophical views of the logical empiricists about the development of scientific knowledge and introduced the notion of the scientific paradigm. He argued that science does not progress in a linear and consistent fashion via an accumulation of knowledge, but proceeds within a scientific paradigm – a set of fundamental theoretical assumptions that guides the direction of inquiry, determines the standard of truth and defines a scientific discipline at any particular period of time. He used the term “normal science” to describe scientific research that operates in accordance with the dominant paradigm. Khun believed that normal science can be interrupted by periods of revolutionary science when old scientific theory and method fail to address the problem or explain new phenomena, or when anomalies occur to undermine the existing theory. If the failure is perceived as serious and persistent, a crisis can arise, culminating in revolutionary changes of theory. A paradigm shift occurs when the scientific community adopts the new paradigm, which leads to the beginning of the new period of normal science. Khun also maintained that the new and old paradigms were ‘incommensurable’ and thus could not be compared. Well known examples of paradigm shifts are the change from classical mechanics to relativistic mechanics, and the shift from classical statistic to big data analytics. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions became an influential and widely read book of the 1960s and sold more than a million copies. It had a profound impact on the history and philosophy of science (and also brought the term “paradigm shift” into common use). It was also controversial since Kuhn challenged the accepted theories of science of the time. Kuhn’s other important works include his first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977), and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity: 1894–1912 (1978).
7992	dbpedia	3	32	https://antimatter.ie/2011/02/01/was-kuhn-more-wrong-than-right/	en	Was Kuhn more wrong than right?	https://antimatter.ie/wp…1/02/images2.jpg	https://antimatter.ie/wp…1/02/images2.jpg	[ "https://antimatter.ie/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/shrn788h.jpg", "https://antimatter.ie/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/images2.jpg?w=500", "https://antimatter.ie/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/images31.jpg?w=500", "https://antimatter.ie/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/duck-rabbit_illusion.jpg?w=300&h=202", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/9e36691190b1c8fb6effafa14074585d0e821213036133df2631b0bf6577c3cc?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/589826d6301db5f490ee0feda4308dddaff69663feaefe6a1c6adf2b372f5079?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/c5a8c0893573197b492a7988af4f6844399fe536d51ffc69541c68179166b0e1?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/589826d6301db5f490ee0feda4308dddaff69663feaefe6a1c6adf2b372f5079?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/c5a8c0893573197b492a7988af4f6844399fe536d51ffc69541c68179166b0e1?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/589826d6301db5f490ee0feda4308dddaff69663feaefe6a1c6adf2b372f5079?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/c5a8c0893573197b492a7988af4f6844399fe536d51ffc69541c68179166b0e1?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/9e36691190b1c8fb6effafa14074585d0e821213036133df2631b0bf6577c3cc?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/3b22a1068812e1b79897d0c528888ab5856f5489ff137b29b5ecbb5a6cf0ca62?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/d302e9f90fb061f81d55d194bbf531db9767fa089260a840670a6274e1089581?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2011-02-01T00:00:00	Today, I sat in on a fascinating lecture on Thomas Kuhn, the noted historian of science, given by Alex Wellerstein to Harvard sophomore students as part of a module in the History of Science. Kuhn is quite possibly the best-known product of Harvard University, famed for his extremely influential book on the history and philosophy…	en	https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico	Antimatter	https://antimatter.ie/2011/02/01/was-kuhn-more-wrong-than-right/	Today, I sat in on a fascinating lecture on Thomas Kuhn, the noted historian of science, given by Alex Wellerstein to Harvard sophomore students as part of a module in the History of Science. Kuhn is quite possibly the best-known product of Harvard University, famed for his extremely influential book on the history and philosophy of science The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Thomas Kuhn and his famous book It was an excellent lecture, outlining the fundamentals of Kuhn’s work in exemplary fashion, as well as setting him in historical context. I particularly enjoyed the lecturer’s emphasis on graphics and explanatory images (I take a keen interest in the methods other academics use to present material). However, as so often when this Kuhn is discussed, I left the room feeling dissatisfied. I had re-read the book in anticipation of the lecture and found myself faced with the same old questions. Just what is it about Thomas Kuhn that bothers me? It’s probably a bit ridiculous to attempt a thorough critique of Kuhn’s seminal work in a blog post, but below are three key objections from an ODS (ordinary decent scientist): *************************************************** 1. The Aristotle question. Kuhn (who trained to PhD level as a physicist) always claimed that much of his approach to the history and philosophy of science was informed by the simple question “How could Aristotle, one of the world’s greatest philosophers, be so wrong about so much of physics?” His answer to this question that Aristotle was not wrong. A. was simply exposed to knowledge that is different to what we have now and therefore simply perceived the world differently to modern scientists. Indeed, much of what A. believed was perfectly reasonable in terms of evidence at the time and we must beware of judging the past through the lens of today’s knowledge. So far, so fairly standard. But what is more radical is that Kuhn then goes on to assert that different perceptions can be equally valid. There is no right or wrong view. This relativism quickly becomes very problematic for practising scientists. First, it ignores the fact that Aristotle was famously disinterested in evidence; he believed the ideas of the mind were far superior to any physical observation. More importantly, today’s science places great emphasis on the concept of wrong; it is only by comparison with observation that we make progress i.e. select between theories that describe the world reasonably accurately and theories that don’t. This process of elimination is a fundamentally different starting point to that of Aristotle et al. and it has driven all the major breakthroughs of modern science. There is surprisingly little discussion of this simple point (now known as Popperian falsification) in Kuhn’s book. 2. A second problem concerns Kuhn’s idea of the paradigm shift in science (considered to be his major contribution). According to Kuhn, all of scientific theory and experiment takes place within a given paradigm. From a theory of gravity to particle physics, experiment and theory generally occur within an agreed overarching sets of beliefs. If enough contradictory evidence builds up that cannot fit the paradigm, a new paradigm then arises which replaces the old i.e. a paradigm shift occurs. So far, this is a perfectly reasonable description of how science is done (if a bit simplistic as it ignores competing models within paradigms etc). But it is what comes next is problematic. According to Kuhn the new paradigm completely replaces the old, rendering the old effectively redundant. Time and again in his book, the new paradigm is portrayed as a new world-view, entirely replacing and invalidating the old, much like a shift in philosophy. This view amazes me, particularly coming from a physicist. First, it is very, very difficult for a paradigm to become established in the first place: it has to provide an adequate explanation for hundreds of measurements in different, but related, fields. This skeptical aspect of science should not be understated. For the same reason, it is difficult for a new paradigm to emerge; this is because it the old paradigm explained a tremendous amount and is not lightly overthrown. If the old is overthrown , it is only on the emergence of startling new evidence, usually gradually accepted over long periods of time. Even then, there are periods of time during which time the new and old coexist and compete (like two records being mixed). Pick any revolution you like, from relativity to quantum physics. The new can only replace the old if it explains all the old did, plus a whole lot more (because as new evidence is uncovered, old evidence also remains). This view of science as a cumulative process (as opposed to alternate views) is criticized by Kuhn, but it matches 20th century science very well. For example, it took quantum physics at least thirty years to emerge; it was the slow accumulation of experimental observation and theory (not Planck’s quantum, as Kuhn asserts). Hence, the new is very much an extension (however radical) of the old and the old paradigm is not discarded. We still use no-relativistic and non-quantum physics to this day, where we always used it; where the limitations do not apply. The duck-rabbit illusion: in Kuhn’s view, a paradigm shift is a change of perception rather than a cumulative process 3. Most problematic of all for scientists is Kuhn’s notion of ‘normal science‘. In his view, when a paradigm shift is not occurring, scientists are engaged in ‘normal research’, essentially dotting the is and crossing the ts of known knowledge. Indeed, this is how most of science is done, in Kuhn’s view. I see this as a serious distortion of scientific practice. For starters, who knows when ‘extraordinary evidence’ is going to turn up? If scientists spent their time in the lab engaged in the collation of routine measurements, revolutions would never happen, because we would not be receptive to extraordinary evidence when it emerges. There is no such thing as ‘normal’ science for the good scientist; one takes equal care in all experiments, for the simple reason that we never know when surprising evidence will emerge. To divide science into arbitrary epochs of ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ seems to me to be the worst sort of revisionism. Far more reasonable is the modern view: that all paradigms are temporary and it is the scientist’s job to test them to their limits. [To give a contemporary example, the Large Hadron Collider was NOT built to ‘find’ the Higgs boson: the LHC was built to investigate whether or not the Higgs particle exists at certain energies (among other things), a very different question. In other words, the paradigm (the Standard Model) may stand (normal science) or may fall (extraordinary science) – there is no telling until the measurement is made. That is why we’re doing the experiment!] ***************************************************************** If the inconsistencies above are right – and I am not the only scientist to make such points – why is Kuhn’s book so famous ? Why so influential, if many scientists, even in Kuhn’s own discipline, consider it flawed? It’s worth pointing out that Kuhn’s work went on to form the bedrock of an entire discipline, the social study of science and technology. Perhaps one answer is who it speaks to. The book is possibly the most widely-read science book ever; widely-read by a great many non-scientists, that is. Here is a dark thought: perhaps Kuhn’s view resonates with historians, social scientists and others, precisely because it resembles practice in their fields more than it does science. To put it baldly, is it popular with those in the humanities because it tells them what they like to hear? We are all scientists now. But look at it this way. It takes years (5-6 min) to train a person to become a reliable experimentalist. That training is not trivial: it is about training the observer to observe as objectively as possible. Of course, science is a social activity, subject to human behaviour. But is this is a determining factor? Don’t scientists go out of their way to minimize social factors by rigorous training in the use of the scientific method? To paraphrase Churchill, it may not be perfectly objective but it is a damn sight more objective than the alternatives! Can an outsider understand the extent of this training if they are not trained in the method? How do all those non-scientists become such experts on the limitations of scientific knowledge? Difficult questions. But it’s interesting that the most trenchant criticism of science often comes from those with almost no training in the area. (Many like to point out that Kuhn himself had a PhD in physics, not realising that, in science, this does not constitute an expert). Finally, Kuhn himself often claimed that he was widely misread and misunderstood. I find this a bit of a cop out; although some of his definitions are rather vague (famously, there is no clear definition of the scientific paradigm), the book is not at all ambiguous in its general thrust. In fact, it is all too clear and very repetitive. Like so many of the studies that were to follow, it takes a good idea and extends it to a radical extent, garnering much attention but alienating the very community that could have benefited from it. The result? Scientists themselves pay very little attention to this book, or to much of the literature of science studies that followed, which is a great pity. This is the great danger of overstatement, in my view Update Below is Alex’s response to my comments on Kuhn above. Bear in mind that he knows a great deal more about this subject than I do! [ Hi Cormac, my thoughts on the blog post, finally…! Thank you for coming to the lecture, and I’m glad it provoked such interesting thoughts. As you know, I’m no strict Kuhnian in any respect, and the lecture was meant to raise far more questions than it answers. Specifically: 1. Aristotle. I don’t think Kuhn was a relativist about Aristotle. I think his point on him was to say, “A. was really a good philosopher, and judging him as a modern physicist is the wrong thing for an historian to do.” Which I’m sure you find an entirely unproblematic statement. What’s interesting is that then people want to jump and take the next step and say, “so that means we should or shouldn’t acknowledge he’s right or wrong?” But Kuhn wouldn’t see it that way. In his later book, _The Essential Tension_, he more or less says, “look, you can’t be a good scientist and a good historian at the same time.” So when you’re judging Aristotle as an historian, you’re using a different standard than if you’re judging him as a physicist. If you look at Artistotle from a modern physicist point of view, the answer is clear: Aristotle is not a good physicist by modern standard for what that means. But Kuhn would say, “Who would say otherwise?” And he might also point out, though, that the standard for a “good physicist” has changed quite a bit over the years. (One of the reasons there is a profusion of amazing Jewish theoretical physicists in German in the first decades of the 20th century is because a “good physicist” in Germany was an experimentalist, and you wouldn’t want to let Jews into those good positions. So they did theoretical physics — and made it “good.”) 2. I agree that the Gestalt shift suggested by Kuhn is awfully unsupported by evidence. In some cases you can see it: the “canonical” revolutions (Copernican, Newtonian, Einsteinian, Darwinian). But it doesn’t very well capture the shifts that happen more frequently, which still don’t fall under the definition of “normal science.” Kuhn’s model is very all-or-nothing in my eyes: you’re either Normal or Revolutionary. It strikes me as a rather stark set of options, and one which does a particularly poor job of describing science after 1945. There are big changes in science after 1945, and I’m not sure I’d say they were all perfectly cumulative (because you’re by definition throwing out everything you’ve decided wasn’t cumulative, even though it was judged to be “good physics” at the time), but I do think it is more “cumulative looking” than the Normal/Revolutionary model. 3. I can see your resistance to the idea of Normal Science, but I’m not sure I agree with your reading of it. Kuhn emphasizes that Normal Science just means that you aren’t spending all day trying to find the Next Big Thing. People aren’t sitting around saying, “let’s throw out all of what we know and do something RADICAL.” They do occasionally do that, and Kuhn’s examples from quantum theory are maybe the best examples of that: you have people like Bohr and Heisenberg saying, “well, what if we just threw causality out of the window, and see what happens?” But that can’t be the day-to-day operation of science. For Kuhn, Normal Science is just trying to advance knowledge a tiny piece at a time, the kind of thing you see in NSF projects: “doable” results that will get you a tiny bit further in knowing how something works. It doesn’t mean you’re just re-running the same experiments all day long — it just means you aren’t re-examining the fundamentals of your theories at every moment. Now it would be a very good question to ask whether current theoretical physics is in Normal or Revolutionary mode according to Kuhn. The String Theory people seem to fluctuate back and forth — there are little moments of stability, and then every few years some of those get completely up-ended. Furthermore, you misunderstand Kuhn if you take him to be using Normal Science as a way to criticize science. In fact, for Kuhn, Normal Science is the key to the reliability of science. It is “dogmatic” and “conservative” on the whole: it requires extraordinary evidence before it decides to unseat its theories, it doggedly avoids flights of fancy. He would compare this (perhaps unfairly) to, say, Literary Theory, which has a new “turn” every decade or so, and lacks any real foundation other than the whimsy of whomever runs the big departments at any given time. The fact that the “hard sciences” don’t change their fundamental theories very often is exactly what makes them so compelling as truth-machines. Their conservatism is their strength. This is actually a very radical aspect of Kuhn that makes him quite different from what most of the social studies of science people interpreted him to be saying. (I’ll be talking about this some more next Monday, when we discuss Feyerabend, who takes the entirely opposite point of view regarding knowledge. Feyerabend’s truly “anarchistic” view of knowledge makes one long for the “dogmatism” of Kuhn!) As for the broader question of why Kuhn is popular, I’m not sure it’s always because it is destabilizing or relativistic. There’s some of that, to be sure. But I do think it’s mostly because he manages to frame these kinds of questions in ways that most people, even those who don’t know or care about science, can understand and respond to. He provides a sort of synthetic whole that we can then play with and modify and adapt to our own anecdotes. That doesn’t mean it is “right” — but it might be “useful.” I think Kuhn does provide an alternative, however vague, to the linear model of scientific progress. Should we be looking for alternatives to that model? I’m sure you and I probably would not agree on that, in any case… :-) I think the linear model, depending on how it is used, can be extremely misleading. I don’t think Kuhn is really right but he highlights some interesting things. I like the idea of Normal Science, though I don’t see it as a transcendent, “real” category. Anyway — this is a big question (if you don’t have the linear model, what do you have?), one that we’ll be really pushing at over the run of the entire course. I don’t claim to know the right answer here, but certain models feel more plausible to me than others.
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"https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/poseido.gif", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/developper.gif", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/proserp.gif", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/partage_Z_2.png", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/partage_E_2.png", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/site/imprimer.png", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/reports/41.png", "https://www.astrotheme.com/images/diagramme.id.output.php?id=4", "https://www.astrotheme.com/images/diagramme.id.output.php?id=5", "https://www.astrotheme.com/images/diagramme.id.output.php?id=9", "https://www.astrotheme.com/images/diagramme.id.output.php?id=10", "https://cdn.astrotheme.com/images/pdf/n3.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "Thomas Kuhn horoscope", "Thomas Kuhn astrology" ]	null	[]	null	Horoscope and natal chart of Thomas Kuhn, born on 1922/07/18: you will find in this page an excerpt of the astrological portrait and the interpration of the planetary dominants.	en	https://cdn.astrotheme.c…e-touch-icon.png		https://www.astrotheme.com/astrology/Thomas_Kuhn	Horoscope and chart of Thomas Kuhn Astrological portrait of Thomas Kuhn (excerpt) Disclaimer: these short excerpts of astrological charts are computer processed. They are, by no means, of a personal nature. This principle is valid for the 68,676 celebrities included in our database. These texts provide the meanings of planets, or combination of planets, in signs and in houses, as well as the interpretations of planetary dominants in line with modern Western astrology rules. Moreover, since Astrotheme is not a polemic website, no negative aspect which may damage the good reputation of a celebrity is posted here, unlike in the comprehensive astrological portrait. Introduction Here are some character traits from Thomas Kuhn's birth chart. This description is far from being comprehensive but it can shed light on his/her personality, which is still interesting for professional astrologers or astrology lovers. In a matter of minutes, you can get at your email address your astrological portrait (approximately 32 pages), a much more comprehensive report than this portrait of Thomas Kuhn. N.B.: as this celebrity's birth time is unknown, the chart is arbitrarily calculated for 12:00 PM - the legal time for his/her place of birth; since astrological houses are not taken into account, this astrological profile excerpt is less detailed than those for which the birth time is known. The dominant planets of Thomas Kuhn When interpreting a natal chart, the best method is to start gradually from general features to specific ones. Thus, there is usually a plan to be followed, from the overall analysis of the chart and its structure, to the description of its different character traits. In the first part, an overall analysis of the chart enables us to figure out the personality's main features and to emphasize several points that are confirmed or not in the detailed analysis: in any case, those general traits are taken into account. Human personality is an infinitely intricate entity and describing it is a complex task. Claiming to rapidly summarize it is illusory, although it does not mean that it is an impossible challenge. It is essential to read a natal chart several times in order to absorb all its different meanings and to grasp all this complexity. But the exercise is worthwhile. In brief, a natal chart is composed of ten planets: two luminaries, the Sun and the Moon, three fast-moving or individual planets, Mercury, Venus and Mars, two slow-moving planets, Jupiter and Saturn, and three very slow-moving planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Additional secondary elements are: the Lunar Nodes, the Dark Moon or Lilith, Chiron and other minor objects. They are all posited on the Zodiac wheel consisting of twelve signs, from Aries to Pisces, and divided into twelve astrological houses. The first step is to evaluate the importance of each planet. This is what we call identifying the dominant planets. This process obeys rules that depend on the astrologer's sensitivity and experience but it also has precise and steady bases: thus, we can take into account the parameters of a planet's activity (the number of active aspects a planet forms, the importance of each aspect according to its nature and its exactness), angularity parameters; (proximity to the four angles, Ascendant, Midheaven, Descendant and Imum Coeli or Nadir, all of them being evaluated numerically, according to the kind of angle and the planet-angle distance) and quality parameters (rulership, exaltation, exile and fall). Finally, other criteria such as the rulership of the Ascendant and the Midheaven etc. are important. These different criteria allow a planet to be highlighted and lead to useful conclusions when interpreting the chart. The overall chart analysis begins with the observation of three sorts of planetary distributions in the chart: Eastern or Western hemisphere, Northern or Southern hemisphere, and quadrants (North-eastern, North-western, South-eastern and South-western). These three distributions give a general tone in terms of introversion and extraversion, willpower, sociability, and behavioural predispositions. Then, there are three additional distributions: elements (called triplicity since there are three groups of signs for each one) - Fire, Air, Earth and Water - corresponding to a character typology, modality (or quadruplicity with four groups of signs for each one) - Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable - and polarity (Yin and Yang). There are three types of dominants: dominant planets, dominant signs and dominant houses. The novice thinks astrology means only "to be Aries" or sometimes, for example, "to be Aries Ascendant Virgo". It is actually far more complex. Although the Sun and the Ascendant alone may reveal a large part of the character - approximately a third or a half of your psychological signature, a person is neither "just the Sun" (called the sign) nor just "the first house" (the Ascendant). Thus, a particular planet's influence may be significantly increased; a particular sign or house may contain a group of planets that will bring nuances and sometimes weaken the role of the Ascendant, of the Sun sign etc. Lastly, there are two other criteria: accentuations (angular, succedent and cadent) which are a classification of astrological houses and types of decanates that are occupied (each sign is divided into three decanates of ten degrees each). They provide some additional informations. These general character traits must not be taken literally; they are, somehow, preparing for the chart reading. They allow to understand the second part of the analysis, which is more detailed and precise. It focuses on every area of the personality and provides a synthesis of all the above-mentioned parameters according to sound hierarchical rules. Warning: when the birth time is unknown, which is the case for Thomas Kuhn, a few paragraphs become irrelevant; distributions in hemispheres and quadrants are meaningless, so are dominant houses and houses' accentuations. Therefore, some chapters are removed from this part. For all paragraphs, the criteria for valuation are calculated without taking into account angles and rulerships of the Ascendant and of the Midheaven. The methodology retains its validity, but it is less precise without a time of birth. Elements and Modes for Thomas Kuhn The predominance of Water signs indicates high sensitivity and elevation through feelings, Thomas Kuhn. Your heart and your emotions are your driving forces, and you can't do anything on Earth if you don't feel a strong affective charge (as a matter of fact, the word "feeling" is essential in your psychology). You need to love in order to understand, and to feel in order to take action, which causes a certain vulnerability which you should fight against. Like the majority of Earth signs, Thomas Kuhn, you are efficient, concrete and not too emotional. What matters to you is what you see: you judge the tree by its fruits. Your ideas keep changing, words disappear, but actions and their consequences are visible and remain. Express your sensitivity, even if it means revealing your vulnerability. Emotions, energy and communication must not be neglected; concrete action is meaningless if it is not justified by your heart, your intellect or your enthusiasm. The twelve zodiacal signs are split up into three groups or modes, called quadruplicities, a learned word meaning only that these three groups include four signs. The Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable modes are more or less represented in your natal chart, depending on planets' positions and importance, and on angles in the twelve signs. Thomas Kuhn, the Cardinal mode is dominant here and indicates a predisposition to action, and more exactly, to impulsion and to undertake: you are very keen to implement the plans you have in mind, to get things going and to create them. This is the most important aspect that inspires enthusiasm and adrenalin in you, without which you can grow weary rapidly. You are individualistic (maybe too much?) and assertive. You let others strengthen and improve the constructions which you built with fervour. Dominants: Planets, Signs and Houses for Thomas Kuhn The issue of dominant planets has existed since the mists of time in astrology: how nice it would be if a person could be described with a few words and one or several planets that would represent their character, without having to analyse such elements as rulerships, angularities, houses, etc! The ten planets - the Sun throughout Pluto - are a bit like ten characters in a role-play, each one has its own personality, its own way of acting, its own strengths and weaknesses. They actually represent a classification into ten distinct personalities, and astrologers have always tried to associate one or several dominant planets to a natal chart as well as dominant signs and houses. Indeed, it is quite the same situation with signs and houses. If planets symbolize characters, signs represent hues - the mental, emotional and physical structures of an individual. The sign in which a planet is posited is like a character whose features are modified according to the place where he lives. In a chart, there are usually one, two or three highlighted signs that allow to rapidly describe its owner. Regarding astrological houses, the principle is even simpler: the twelve houses correspond to twelve fields of life, and planets tenanting any given house increase that house's importance and highlight all relevant life departments: it may be marriage, work, friendship etc. In your natal chart, Thomas Kuhn, the ten main planets are distributed as follows: The three most important planets in your chart are the Moon, Pluto and Uranus. The Moon is one of the most important planets in your chart and endows you with a receptive, emotive, and imaginative nature. You have an innate ability to instinctively absorb atmospheres and impressions that nurture you, and as a result, you are often dreaming your life away rather than actually living it. One of the consequences of your spontaneity may turn into popularity, or even fame: the crowd is a living and complex entity, and it always appreciates truth and sincerity rather than calculation and total self-control. As a Lunar character, you find it difficult to control yourself, you have to deal with your moods, and you must be careful not to stay passive in front of events: nothing is handed on a plate, and although your sensitivity is rich, even richer than most people's, you must make a move and spare some of your energy for... action! With Pluto as a dominant planet in your chart, you are a magnetic and mighty predator, like the Scorpio sign ruled by this planet, who needs to exert pressure on others in order to "test" them. You are always ready to evolve, to risk destruction for reconstruction - including your own - to live more intensely whilst imposing your secret authority on things and on people you encounter. You may come across as wicked, cruel or too authoritarian, but actually you only follow your instinct, you sound people out, and you like to exert your domination simply because your vital energy is too powerful to remain inside. You are inclined to be passionate, with hidden motivations. You are sometimes misunderstood but one of your great Plutonian assets is to go successfully through each life ordeal with ever growing strength. Uranus is among your dominant planets: just like Neptune and Pluto, Uranian typology is less clearly defined than the so-called classical seven planets that are visible to the naked eye, from the Sun to Saturn. However, it is possible to associate your Uranian nature with a few clear characteristics: Uranus rhymes with independence, freedom, originality, or even rebelliousness and marginality, when things go wrong... Uranus is Mercury's higher octave and as such, he borrows some of its traits of character; namely, a tendency to intellectualize situations and emotions with affective detachment, or at least jagged affectivity. Therefore, you are certainly a passionate man who is on the lookout for any kind of action or revolutionary idea, and you are keen on new things. Uranians are never predictable, and it is especially when they are believed to be stable and well settled that... they change everything - their life, partner, and job! In fact, you are allergic to any kind of routine, although avoiding it must give way to many risks. In your natal chart, the three most important signs - according to criteria mentioned above - are in decreasing order of strength Cancer, Taurus and Libra. In general, these signs are important because your Ascendant or your Sun is located there. But this is not always the case: there may be a cluster of planets, or a planet may be near an angle other than the Midheaven or Ascendant. It may also be because two or three planets are considered to be very active because they form numerous aspects from these signs. Thus, you display some of the three signs' characteristics, a bit like a superposition of features on the rest of your chart, and it is all the more so if the sign is emphasized. Cancer is one of your dominant signs and endows you with imagination and exceptionally shrewd sensitivity. Although suspicious at first sight - and even at second...- as soon as you get familiar with people and let them win your confidence, your golden heart eventually shows up, despite your discretion and your desire for security that make you return into your shell at the slightest alert! Actually, you are a poet and if you are sometimes blamed for your nostalgia and your laziness, it is because your intense inner life is at full throttle... With the Taurus sign so important in your chart, you are constructive, stable, and sensual. Good taste, sense of beauty, manners, and unfailing good sense - all these qualities contribute to your charm and seductive power. Furthermore, if some people criticize your slow pace and your stubbornness, you rightly reply that this is the price for your security, and that you like the way it is - slow and steady.... With Libra as a dominant sign in your natal chart, you love to please, to charm, and to be likeable. Moreover, you are naturally inclined towards tolerance and moderation, as well as elegance and tact, as if you were meant to please! Of course, you always find malcontents who criticize your lack of authenticity or of courage and your half-heartedness, but your aim is to be liked, and in this field, you are an unrivalled champion! After this paragraph about dominant planets, of Thomas Kuhn, here are the character traits that you must read more carefully than the previous texts since they are very specific: the texts about dominant planets only give background information about the personality and remain quite general: they emphasize or, on the contrary, mitigate different particularities or facets of a personality. A human being is a complex whole and only bodies of texts can attempt to successfully figure out all the finer points. The Moon in Taurus: his sensitivity You love nature as much as your comfort, Thomas Kuhn, you are an Epicurean willing to enjoy life's beautiful and good things within the family clan or with friends who value your conviviality and your kindness. You are faithful, stable, with your feet rooted in the ground and you are reliable in all circumstances. You are attached to your affective and material security. You tend to be jealous and possessive and, although your nature is quite slow, you may be short-tempered and aggressive when you feel threatened. In such cases, you display an exceptional stubbornness and fury and it becomes impossible to make you change your mind. Although you are aware that your behaviour is wrong, you stick to your line and your grudge is persistent. However, you are so sensitive to tenderness and to concrete gestures of affection that a few presents or a few caresses are enough to make you see life through rose-coloured glasses again... Mercury in Cancer: his intellect and social life Your intelligence is sensitive and delicate, with good comprehension abilities, Thomas Kuhn, which endows you with a strong intuition and receptivity. To you, impressions and feelings prevail over facts and your excellent selective memory is not cluttered with useless elements. Although you are not aware, your fertile imagination may lead you to change your daily reality so that it matches your dreams better. If you are creative, you may make use of your imagination in literary pursuits where you can freely invent beautiful stories taking place in the past. Your passion for History is such that you may immerse yourself into it with too much nostalgia and therefore, you may miss opportunities the present offers to design projects and to think of the future. Venus in Virgo and the Sun in Cancer: his affectivity and seductiveness In your chart, the Sun is in Cancer and Venus, in Virgo. Modesty and moderation: they are the dominant characteristics of the Cancer-Virgo duet, according to the Tradition. You are not the most extroverted person in the world and it is hard for you to declare your love or to express your passion. It might be due to a form of shyness, a desire to protect yourself and to prevent people from upsetting your fragile affective balance. Regardless of the intensity of your love, your partner must not expect staggering declarations, but an unfailing faithfulness, a real dedication motivated by the desire to build a privileged, isolated and treasured relationship. It is likely that tenderness is the key to your affective fulfilment. Without tenderness, there can be no deep-seated balance. In the long run, you cannot be satisfied with budding flashes of passion and with a relationship solely based on heart tumults. The real adventure begins when the wild excitements of the early stages fade away, when you have nothing to prove to yourself and when mutual confidence allows for a life together, despite the inevitable differences between you and your partner. You probably belong to that category of lover for whom time is an asset rather than an enemy. An ally needed for the full blossoming of your relationship. Thomas Kuhn, inside yourself, feelings are strong and powerful. However, you never show them before weighing up and considering all the possible consequences of your words and your actions: fieriness and spontaneousness are toned down because you cannot help controlling yourself, probably due to your modesty, your discretion or your shyness; you are frightened because you are so concerned with other people's opinion that you see passion, or expressing your feelings too quickly, as sources of danger. However, you are helpful, simple, and you do not fuss around. Reason prevails in your love life but your heart may flare up when the context is well organized and everyday life is cautiously handled with good sense, tidiness and cleanliness. Your sensitivity prompts you to avoid excesses and outbursts and this is how you think that you can achieve happiness without risk. The Sun in Cancer: his will and inner motivations Psychologically speaking, your nature is dreamy, oriented towards nostalgia for things past. You are very instinctive and you protect yourself against the outside world. Your inner life is rich, with fertile and even unlimited imagination, a propensity to avoid unnecessary risks and to pursue security. You show your true face only to persons you can trust, when there is a kind of well being triggered by the nostalgia for the past. As you are born under this sign, you are emotional, sentimental, restful, imaginative, sensitive, loyal, enduring, protective, vulnerable, generous, romantic, tender, poetic, maternal, dreamy, indolent, greedy and dedicated. You may also be fearful, unrealistic, evasive, passive, touchy, anxious, dependent, stubborn, lunatic, backward-looking, lazy, burdensome, impenetrable and a homebody. Love in the masculine mode: for you, Sir, in love, you are tender, sensitive and quite loyal. You are influenced by a mother-figure and you unconsciously look for a partner who will offer as much attention and affection as you used to receive as a child. You are a homebody and a dreamer and you blossom in the family cocoon you create, dreaming of adventures and extraordinary trips that you most often take in your head. Tenderness is more important than sexuality, even though it is also an agent for security and for stability. You tremendously appreciate to be again the spoiled child that you used to be, as you savour tasty little dishes or as you receive the frequent praises you need in order to feel reassured. You are sheltered from tragedies and life complications because at the very moment when a difficult situation emerges, you nip it in the bud either by ignoring it or by withdrawing into your shell quietly, until the storm subsides. Your home is happy and rich, quiet and harmonious, throughout your life. Mars in Sagittarius: his ability to take action Thomas Kuhn, you are a real Goliath and you often excel in sport; your thirst for conquests prompts you to constantly launch new challenges. The enthusiasm you put in your undertakings is perfectly well supported by your moral concepts and an idealism compatible with the values of the society you live in. You are pragmatic, enterprising and sometimes, naive. You do not pay attention to details and you launch various great adventurous projects that are all doomed to success. In a few rare cases, you can funnel your huge energy into more philosophical, even spiritual or religious enterprises, where your entire fieriness works wonders. On the sexual plane, your ardour and your spontaneity are your main assets. The danger is that you may spread yourself too thin in the sense that you may forget about faithfulness, particularly during the extensive faraway travels you are so fond of. Conclusion This text is only an excerpt from of Thomas Kuhn's portrait. If you want to get your own astrological portrait, much more comprehensive that this present excerpt, you can order it at this page. Do you belong to the Jupiterian type, benevolent and generous? The Martian type, active and a go-getter? The Venusian type, charming and seductive? The Lunar type, imaginative and sensitive? The Solar type, noble and charismatic? The Uranian type, original, uncompromising and a freedom-lover? The Plutonian type, domineering and secretive? The Mercurian type, cerebral, inquiring and quick? The Neptunian type, visionary, capable of empathy and impressionable? The Saturnian type, profound, persevering and responsible? Are you more of the Fire type, energetic and intuitive? The Water type, sentimental and receptive? The Earth type, realistic and efficient? Or the Air type, gifted in communication and highly intellectual? 11 planetary dominants and 57 characteristics are reviewed, quantified, and interpreted; then, your psychological portrait is described in detail, in a comprehensive document of approximately 32-36 pages, full of engrossing and original pieces of information about yourself. Astrological reports describe many of the character traits and they sometimes go deeper into the understanding of a personality. Please, always keep in mind that human beings are continuously evolving and that many parts of our psychological structures are likely to be expressed later, after having undergone significant life's experiences. It is advised to read a portrait with hindsight in order to appreciate its astrological content. Under this condition, you will be able to take full advantage of this type of study. The analysis of an astrological portrait consists in understanding four types of elements which interact with one another: ten planets, twelve zodiacal signs, twelve houses, and what are called aspects between planets (the 11 aspects most commonly used are: conjunction, opposition, square, trine, sextile, quincunx, semi-sextile, sesqui-quadrate, quintile and bi-quintile. The first 5 aspects enumerated are called major aspects). Planets represent typologies of our human psychology: sensitivity, affectivity, ability to undertake, will-power, mental process, aptitude, and taste for communication etc., all independent character facets are divided here for practical reasons. The twelve signs forming the space where planets move will "colour", so to speak, these typologies with each planet being located in its particular sign. They will then enrich the quality of these typologies, as expressed by the planets. The Zodiac is also divided into twelve astrological houses. This makes sense only if the birth time is known because within a few minutes, the twelve houses (including the 1st one, the Ascendant) change significantly. They correspond to twelve specific spheres of life: external behaviour, material, social and family life, relationship, home, love life, daily work, partnership, etc. Each planet located in any given house will then act according to the meaning of its house, and a second colouration again enriches those active forces that the planets symbolize. Finally, relations will settle among planets, creating a third structure, which completes the planets' basic meanings. A set of ancient rules, which has stood the test of experience over hundreds of years (although astrology is in evolution, only reliable elements are integrated into classical studies), are applied to organize the whole chart into a hierarchy and to allow your personality to be interpreted by texts. The planets usually analysed are the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, which means two luminaries (the Sun and the Moon) and 8 planets, a total of 10 planets. Additional secondary elements may be taken into account, such as asteroids Chiron, Vesta, Pallas, Ceres (especially Chiron, more well-known), the Lunar nodes, the Dark Moon or Lilith, and even other bodies: astrology is a discipline on the move. Astrological studies, including astrological portrait, compatibility of couples, predictive work, and horoscopes evolve and become more accurate or deeper, as time goes by. Precision: concerning the horoscopes with a known time of birth, according to the Tradition, we consider that a planet near the beginning (called cuspide) of the next house (less than 2 degrees for the Ascendant and the Midheaven, and less than 1 degree for all other houses) belongs to this house: our texts and dominants take this rule into account. You can also choose not to take this shift into account in the form, and also tick the option Koch or Equal houses system instead of Placidus, the default houses system. Warning: In order to avoid any confusion and any possible controversy, we want to draw your attention upon the fact that this sample of celebrities is very complete and therefore, it also includes undesirable people, since every category is represented: beside artists, musicians, politicians, lawyers, professional soldiers, poets, writers, singers, explorers, scientists, academics, religious figures, saints, philosophers, sages, astrologers, mediums, sportsmen, chess champions, famous victims, historical characters, members of royal families, models, painters, sculptors, and comics authors or other actual celebrities, there are also famous murderers, tyrants and dictators, serial-killers, or other characters whose image is very negative, often rightly so. Regarding the latter, it must be remembered that even a monster or at least a person who perpetrated odious crimes, has some human qualities, often noticed by his/her close entourage: these excerpts come from computer programmes devoid of polemical intentions and may seem too soft or lenient. The positive side of each personality is deliberately stressed. Negative sides have been erased here - it is not the same in our comprehensive reports on sale - because it could hurt the families of such people. We are hoping that it will not rebound on the victims' side. Numerology: Birth Path of Thomas Kuhn Testimonies to numerology are found in the most ancient civilizations and show that numerology pre-dates astrology. This discipline considers the name, the surname, and the date of birth, and ascribes a meaning to alphabetic letters according to the numbers which symbolise them. The path of life, based on the date of birth, provides indications on the kind of destiny which one is meant to experience. It is one of the elements that must reckoned with, along with the expression number, the active number, the intimacy number, the achievement number, the hereditary number, the dominant numbers or the lacking numbers, or also the area of expression, etc. Your Life Path is influenced by the number 3, which highlights communication and creativity, and indicates that ideas and personal realisations are the important features of your destiny. This number is related to altruism, harmony, the capacity to take initiatives, and the gift for passing on all kinds of knowledge and information. So, you are a person of communication, and your concern is to disseminate your ideas and your beliefs, as well as to discover other approaches and schools of thoughts. In a word, you are open to the world! You express yourself better when you are in situations which allow a great deal of personal initiatives. Then, your inventiveness works wonders. On the other hand, you find it hard to fulfil repetitive tasks and to accept the monotony of a life devoid of surprise. Your creativity is as strong as your need for freedom, and people often envy you because, even though you may encounter a few hurdles, your ingenuity enables you to merrily grow on your path. Thomas Kuhn was born under the sign of the Dog, element Water Chinese astrology is brought to us as a legacy of age-old wisdom and invites us to develop an awareness of our inner potential. It is believed that the wise man is not subjected to stellar influences. However, we must gain the lucidity and the distance without which we remain locked up in an implacable destiny. According to the legend of the Circle of Animals, Buddha summoned all the animals to bid them farewell before he left our world. Only twelve species answered Buddha's call. They form the Chinese Zodiac and symbolize the twelve paths of wisdom that are still valid nowadays. The Asian wise man considers that a path is neither good nor bad. One can and must develop one's potentialities. The first step is to thoroughly know oneself. You belong to the category of reliable people, true to their principles as well as loyal to their friends. You try to organize your life settings. If you are not concerned with the disorder that is external to your private sphere, everything related to your personality and your environment must be in order. Therefore, you are a perfectionist by nature, but you are also anxious and meticulous to an exaggerate point: you enjoy discussing details, analyzing and criticizing everything. Your concern is to keep your realm under control, which implies a fair amount of modesty and some distance. The Dog is aware of his limits and he prefers to stick to what he masters rather than being tempted by some exceedingly adventurous conquest. But the capacity to control your realm constitutes an obvious asset, an extraordinary driving force favouring your evolution. As one contents oneself with doing well in the field which one thoroughly masters, one can go far, very far... Methodically - sometimes with your own method - you allow the dust to settle, you purify, using a process of elimination, until the essentials only remain. You may be lacking ambition. It does not matter! You leave panache and veneer to other people and you take up challenges in your unique way, with discretion, moderation, modesty or reserve. Chinese astrology has five elements, which are referred to as agents: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. You have a deep affinity with the agent Water. In China, this element corresponds to the planet Mercury, the black colour and the number 6. You are particularly sensitive to your surroundings, the atmosphere of a place and the climate of a meeting. Your high receptivity allows you to perceive naturally the stakes underlying people and situations. You are reserved by nature, you favour emotions and inner life, leaving challenges and audacity to other people. You frequently maintain a certain distance and you share your true feelings with few intimate friends only. It is probably because you know that genuine communication is a difficult exercise. Everything in your realm is sheer subtlety and nuance. The danger is that you may escape realities and indulge in indolence without fulfilling your responsibilities. This is the other side of the coin of your extraordinary sensitivity and your exceptional clear-sightedness. You feel in tune with few people. However, this selectivity forges relationships that are long-lasting because they are natural and genuine. N. B.: when the birth time is unknown, (12:00 PM (unknown)), these portrait excerpts do not take into account the parameters derived from the time, which means, the domification (Ascendant, astrological houses, etc.). Nonetheless, these analyses remain accurate in any case. Regarding the sources of the birth data in our possession, kindly note that the pages we publish constitute a starting point for more detailed research, even though they seem useful to us. When the sources are contradictory, which occurs rarely, after having analysed them, we choose the most reliable one. Sometimes, we publish a birth date just because it is made available, but we do not claim that is it the best one, by no means.
7992	dbpedia	2	91	https://www.joabj.com/Writing/Tech/History/2204-Kuhn-Revolution.html	en	Thomas Kuhn: How to Spot a Revolution	http://www.joabj.com/Photos/2022/2202-PL-West_Texas-Sunset.jpg	http://www.joabj.com/Photos/2022/2202-PL-West_Texas-Sunset.jpg	[ "https://www.joabj.com/Photos/2022/2202-PL-West_Texas-Sunset.jpg", "https://www.joabj.com/Tilde-Color.jpg", "https://www.joabj.com/Tilde-Color.jpg", "https://www.joabj.com/Writing/Tech/History/Art/Structure-of-scientific-revolutions-1st-ed-pb.png", "https://www.joabj.com/Tilde-Color.jpg", "https://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0226458121&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=httpwwwjoabjc-20", "https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=httpwwwjoabjc-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0226458121", "https://www.joabj.com/Tilde-Color.jpg", "https://www.joabj.com/Photos/site/RSS-Button.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Joab Jackson" ]	null	A short summary of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn		/Favicon.ico	Joab Jackson, Web site	http://www.joabj.com/Writing/Tech/History2204-Kuhn-Revolution.html	The first thing you notice is the anxiety, the growing frustration of small bits not quite fitting together like they should, an unease that what was taught to you is not entirely true. Overall though, everything runs pretty well these days. Once, everything was possible, with different people trying wildly different experiments. Over time, however, we all converged on what is now known as The Way. So for us here, today, our lot is to work out all out all the messy little details and edge cases. Specialists communicating with other specialists. But then someone discovers something new. The discovery itself is attributed to a single person, but this is rarely true. Discovery is a process. It builds on the observations of many people. But the spark itself can not be just built up through the analysis of existing facts alone. Someone, or perhaps several people in different locations, has a flash, an intuition about the way something works. Often it is born from observing some anomaly. The discovery itself may at first seem laughably small, but it will soon tear the whole community asunder, people taking sides over this new thing is the Way Forward or not. It cannot be fit into the old way of doing things, and everything that is already known must be reevaluated with how it fits into this new discovery. In communities both small and large, a discovery comes along that doesnât fit in with everything else the experts know. It doesn't fit with the fundamentals. And plank by plank, the older belief system will be torn up and replaced by planks of a new foundation. Old data has to be reinterpreted by this new perspective. New instruments must be created to observe new forms of data, and even the old instruments can reveal new information. The world, to the observer, has been changed. Those taking up for the new way are younger. They have less experience with the old ways, and less investment too. The older champions of the previous thing will either quietly convert. Or eventually die out. And the new way will come to see more normal, providing more answers than the old way, in how life works. After awhile, the work behind these revolutions is all but forgotten. The work of previous generations is written into the dominant narrative as preparation for the groups of facts that we now know. History implies inevitability, the revolution is downplayed, in order for us to simplify our current set of beliefs. In the realm of science, philosopher Thomas Kuhn, in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," defined a revolution as "those non-cumulative developmental episodes, in which an older paradigm is replaced, in whole or in part, by an incompatible newer one.â In the history of science, these major shifts have happened with electricity, chemical engineering and with our understanding of how the universe works. âAfter Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world," Kuhn wrote. Italian scientist Galileo Galilei saw the swinging motion of a chandelier and wondered about the underlying laws forces propelling the motion. This led to the concept of the pendulum, which proved to be useful in timekeeping. Later, John Dalton's Atomic Theory gave chemists an easy path to mathematically explain compounds in terms of their basic elements. In the early 16th century, astronomers realized their theories werenât explaining everything. This was just before Copernicus rejected the then-dominant theories of Ptolemy. The old theories can be shown as flat-out wrong. But more often, they are seen as subsets of the new ideas. Technically speaking, Newtonian theory is wrong in light of Einsteinâs later postulation of relativity. Few believe that these days however. Instead, today it is seen as a special subset of Einsteinian relativity, using only the tools and the theories from Newton's time. âLater scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles, in often quite different environments to which they are applied," Kuhn wrote. Tacit knowledge which is learned by doing science, rather than learning rules about doing science. In this way âNature and words are learned together,â Kuhn wrote. âInterpretation begins where perception ends.â But interpretation requires prior experience and training. And so there is a social element to the progress of science as well, âthe manner in which a particular set of shared values interacts with the particular experiences shared by a community of specialists,â Kuhn noted. Science aims to âbring theory and fact into closer agreement,â Kuhn writes. It is a competition of facts to see which ones best fit the theories. This unrelenting way of looking forward is necessary, however. "A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost," Alfred North Whitehead once said. Quotes and Notes âFor the far smaller professional group affected by them, Maxwellâs equations were as revolutionary as Einsteinâs, and they were resisted accordingly.â âThe new theory implies a change in the rules governing the prior practice of normal science.â âA new theory, however special its range of application, is seldom or never, just an increment to what is already known. Its assimilation requires a reconstruction of prior theory, and a reevaluation of prior fact.â i.e. the arrival of Oxygen or Xrays required âreevaluated traditional experimental procedures, altered its conception of entities with which it has long been familiar, and in the process, shifted the network of theory trough which it deals with the world.â âThe results gained in normal research are significant because they add to the scope and precision with which the paradigm can be applied.â âWhen scientists disagree about whether the fundamental problems of their fields have been solved, the search for rules gains a function that it does not ordinary possess.â When paradigms are secured, they do not need to be debated. âNormal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory, and when successful finds none. New and unsuspected phenomena are repeatedly uncovered by scientific research.â âWe so readily assume that discovering, like seeing or touching, should be unequivocally attributed to an individual, and to a moment of time.â Both are rarely true. What Lavoisier had âwas not so much the discovery of oxygen as the oxygen theory of combustion.â Science aims to âbring theory and fact into closer agreement.â An anomaly comes to seem to be more than just another puzzle of normal science. The transition to crisis, and to extraordinary science, has begun.â âAll crises begin with a blurring of a paradigm, and a consequent loosening of the rules for normal research.â The process of switching over is â¦âhandling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another, by giving them a different framework.â âAlmost always, the men who achieved these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young, or very new to the fieldâ â¦ they were âbeing little committed to prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science.â âIn both political and scientific development, the sense of malfunction that can lead to crisis is prerequisite to revolution.â âEach group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigmâs defense.â âCumulative acquisition of unanticipated novelties proves to be an almost non-existent exception to scientific development.â âToo many of the older histories of science, refer to only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the paradigmâs problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems.â
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7992	dbpedia	0	30	https://transhumanism.fandom.com/wiki/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn	en	Thomas Samuel Kuhn	https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ucp-internal-test-starter-commons/images/a/aa/FandomFireLogo.png/revision/latest?cb=20210713142711	https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ucp-internal-test-starter-commons/images/a/aa/FandomFireLogo.png/revision/latest?cb=20210713142711	[ "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/6a181c72-e8bf-419b-b4db-18fd56a0eb60", "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/6c42ce6a-b205-41f5-82c6-5011721932e7", "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/464fc70a-5090-490b-b47e-0759e89c263f", "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/f7bb9d33-4f9a-4faa-88fe-2a0bd8138668" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Contributors to Transhumanism Wiki" ]	2024-07-29T22:27:06+00:00	Thomas Samuel Kuhn (surname pronounced /ˈkuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American intellectual who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the philosophy of science. Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an...	en	/skins-ucp/mw139/common/favicon.ico	Transhumanism Wiki	https://transhumanism.fandom.com/wiki/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn	No Title No Title No information Thomas Samuel Kuhn (surname pronounced /ˈkuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American intellectual who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the philosophy of science. Life[] Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He obtained his bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943, and master's and Ph.D in physics in 1946 and 1949, respectively. He later taught a course in the history of science at Harvard from 1948 until 1956 at the suggestion of university president James Conant. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. At Berkeley, he wrote and published (in 1962) his best known and most influential work:[1] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. Kuhn interviewed and taped Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before Bohr's death. The recording contains the last words of Niels Bohr caught on tape.[citation needed] In 1994, Kuhn was diagnosed with cancer of the bronchial tubes, of which he died in 1996. Kuhn was married twice, first to Kathryn Muhs (with whom he had three children) and later to Jehane Barton (Jehane R. Kuhn). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions[] Main article: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR), Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "paradigm shifts" (although he did not coin the phrase),[2] in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is followed by "normal science", when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by "puzzle-solving". Thus, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Popper's refutability criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science. In SSR, Kuhn also argues that rival paradigms are incommensurable—that is, it is not possible to understand one paradigm through the conceptual framework and terminology of another rival paradigm. For many critics, for example David Stove (Popper and After, 1982), this thesis seemed to entail that theory choice is fundamentally irrational: if rival theories cannot be directly compared, then one cannot make a rational choice as to which one is better. Whether Kuhn's views had such relativistic consequences is the subject of much debate; Kuhn himself denied the accusation of relativism in the third edition of SSR, and sought to clarify his views to avoid further misinterpretation. Freeman Dyson has quoted Kuhn as saying "I am not a Kuhnian!",[3] referring to the relativism that some philosophers have developed based on his work. The book was originally printed as an article in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, published by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides "paradigm shift", Kuhn raised the word "paradigm" itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics to its current broader meaning, coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term "scientific revolutions" in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single "Scientific Revolution" in the late Renaissance. The frequent use of the phrase "paradigm shift" has made scientists more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that Kuhn’s analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced that evolution.[citation needed] Kuhn's work has been extensively used in social science; for instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International Relations. Kuhn is credited as a foundational force behind the post-Mertonian Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. A defense Kuhn gives against the objection that his account of science from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions results in relativism can be found in an essay by Kuhn called "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice."[4] In this essay, he reiteriates five criteria from the penultimate chapter of SSR that determine (or help determine, more properly) theory choice: - Accurate - empirically adequate with experimentation and observation - Consistent - internally consistent, but also externally consistent with other theories - Broad Scope - a theory's consequencies should extend beyond that which it was initially designed to explain - Simple - the simplest explanation, principally similar to Occam's Razor - Fruitful - a theory should disclose new phenomena or new relationships among phenomena He then goes on to show how, although these criteria admittedly determine theory choice, they are imprecise in practice and relative to individual scientists. According to Kuhn, "When scientists must choose between competing theories, two men fully committed to the same list of criteria for choice may nevertheless reach different conclusions."[5] For this reason, basically, the criteria still are not "objective" in the usual sense of the word because individual scientists reach different conclusions with the same criteria due to valuing one criterion over another or even adding additional criteria for selfish or other subjective reasons. Kuhn then goes on to say, "I am suggesting, of course, that the criteria of choice with which I began function not as rules, which determine choice, but as values, which influence it."[6] Because Kuhn utilizes the history of science in his account of science, his criteria or values for theory choice are often understood as descriptive normative rules (or more properly, values) of theory choice for the scientific community rather than prescriptive normative rules in the usual sense of the word "criteria," although there are many varied interpretations of Kuhn's account of science. The Polanyi-Kuhn debate[] Scientific historians and scholars have noted similarities between Kuhn's work and the work of Michael Polanyi. Although they used different terminologies, both scientists believed that scientists' subjective experiences made science a relativistic discipline. Polanyi lectured on this topic for decades before Kuhn published "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Supporters of Polanyi charged Kuhn with plagiarism, as it was known that Kuhn attended several of Polanyi's lectures, and that the two men had debated endlessly over the epistemology of science before either had achieved fame. In response to these critics, Kuhn cited Polanyi in the second edition of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," and the two scientists agreed to set aside their differences in the hopes of enlightening the world to the dynamic nature of science. Despite this intellectual alliance, Polanyi's work was constantly interpreted by others within the framework of Kuhn's paradigm shifts, much to Polanyi's (and Kuhn's) dismay.[7] Honors[] Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, and in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. He was also awarded numerous honorary doctorates. Bibliography[] Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press and Acumen Press, 2000. ISBN 1-902683-10-2 Fuller, Steve.Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-26894-2 Sal Restivo, The Myth of the Kuhnian Revolution. Sociological Theory, Vol. 1, (1983), 293-305. Hoyningen-Huene, Paul (1993): Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T.S. The Copernican Revolution: planetary astronomy in the development of Western thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. ISBN 0-674-17100-4 Kuhn, T.S. The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science. Isis, 52(1961): 161-193. Kuhn, T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. ISBN 0-226-45808-3 Kuhn, T.S. "The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research". Pp. 347-69 in A. C. Crombie (ed.). Scientific Change (Symposium on the History of Science, University of Oxford, 9-15 July 1961). New York and London: Basic Books and Heineman, 1963. Kuhn, T.S. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977. ISBN 0-226-45805-9 Kuhn, T.S. Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ISBN 0-226-45800-8 Kuhn, T.S. The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-45798-2 See also[] History and philosophy of science John L. Heilbron References[] Black-body theory and the quantum discontinuity: 1894-1912 (1978) [] Thomas Kuhn (Biography, Outline of Structure of Scientific Revolutions) "Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm" (obituary by Lawrence Van Gelder, New York Times, 19 June 1996) Thomas S. Kuhn (obituary, The Tech p9 vol 116 no 28, 26 June 1996) Thomas Kuhn at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Review in the New York Review of Books Color Photo History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science BOOK VI: Kuhn on Revolution and Feyerabend on Anarchy - with free downloads for public use. article on his Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays John Horgan's Interview http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/shapers/kuhn/ {{{header}}} {{{body}}}
7992	dbpedia	1	85	https://www.allmusic.com/artist/dieter-thomas-kuhn-mn0000499430	en	Music Search, Recommendations, Videos and Reviews	https://cf.allmusic.com/…cebook_share.png	https://cf.allmusic.com/…cebook_share.png	[ "https://cf.allmusic.com/images/logo_tower_whiteonblack.svg", "https://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6685975&cv=2.0&cj=1" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	AllMusic provides comprehensive music info including reviews and biographies. Get recommendations for new music to listen to, stream or own.	en	https://cf.allmusic.com/….png?v=47BXOjEqB	AllMusic	https://www.allmusic.com/updated
7992	dbpedia	3	6	https://blog.oup.com/2019/11/thomas-kuhn-paradigm-shift-philosopher-of-the-month/	en	Thomas Kuhn and the paradigm shift – Philosopher of the Month	https://oupblog.wpengine…ured-image-1.jpg	https://oupblog.wpengine…ured-image-1.jpg	[ "https://oupblog.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/themes/oup-blog-usa//images/oup-logo.png", "https://oupblog.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Kuhn_Featured-image-1.jpg", "https://oupblog.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/OUP-Philosophy-Crest-184x184.jpeg", "https://oupblog.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/dil-F35EmcotWPY-unsplashedit-1-744x286.jpg", "https://oupblog.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/themes/oup-blog-usa//images/oup-logo-footer.png?ts=5" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "OUPblog Editor" ]	2019-11-14T10:30:49+00:00	Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922–d. 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science best-known for his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) which influenced social sciences and theories of knowledge. He is widely considered one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.	en		OUPblog	https://blog.oup.com/2019/11/thomas-kuhn-paradigm-shift-philosopher-of-the-month/	Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science best-known for his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which influenced social sciences and theories of knowledge. He is widely considered one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Kuhn was born in in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Samuel Lewis Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He obtained his Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and PhD in physics from Harvard University. While completing his PhD, he worked as a teaching assistant for Harvard President James B. Conant, who designed and taught the general education history of science courses. This experience allowed Kuhn to switch from physics to the study of the history and philosophy of science. From 1948 until 1956, Kuhn taught a course in the history of science at Harvard. Subsequently he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, then at Princeton University, and finally at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) where from 1982 until the end of his academic career in 1991 he was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn challenged the prevailing philosophical views of the logical empiricists about the development of scientific knowledge and introduced the notion of the scientific paradigm. He argued that science does not progress in a linear and consistent fashion via an accumulation of knowledge, but proceeds within a scientific paradigm – a set of fundamental theoretical assumptions that guides the direction of inquiry, determines the standard of truth and defines a scientific discipline at any particular period of time. He used the term “normal science” to describe scientific research that operates in accordance with the dominant paradigm. Khun believed that normal science can be interrupted by periods of revolutionary science when old scientific theory and method fail to address the problem or explain new phenomena, or when anomalies occur to undermine the existing theory. If the failure is perceived as serious and persistent, a crisis can arise, culminating in revolutionary changes of theory. A paradigm shift occurs when the scientific community adopts the new paradigm, which leads to the beginning of the new period of normal science. Khun also maintained that the new and old paradigms were ‘incommensurable’ and thus could not be compared. Well known examples of paradigm shifts are the change from classical mechanics to relativistic mechanics, and the shift from classical statistic to big data analytics. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions became an influential and widely read book of the 1960s and sold more than a million copies. It had a profound impact on the history and philosophy of science (and also brought the term “paradigm shift” into common use). It was also controversial since Kuhn challenged the accepted theories of science of the time. Kuhn’s other important works include his first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977), and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity: 1894–1912 (1978).
7992	dbpedia	3	73	https://artfulscientist.home.blog/2019/06/04/thomas-kuhn-and-the-art-science-paradigm/	en	Thomas Kuhn and the Art Science Paradigm	https://artfulscientist.…uhn-portrait.png	https://artfulscientist.…uhn-portrait.png	[ "https://artfulscientist.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/thomas-kuhn-portrait.png?w=1100", "https://artfulscientist.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/geocentric.jpg?w=1100", "https://artfulscientist.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/ugc_1810_and_ugc_1813_in_arp_273_captured_by_the_hubble_space_telescope.jpg?w=1100", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/8ed41ed9ee64ce947c0af037b21af9dba88b6a830ba52f90c8be075c8d745e71?s=80&d=identicon&r=G", "https://artfulscientist.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/cropped-atom1.jpg?w=50", "https://artfulscientist.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/cropped-atom1.jpg?w=50", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2019-06-04T00:00:00	“For many centuries, both in antiquity and again in early modern Europe, painting was regarded as the cumulative discipline. During those years the artist’s goal was assumed to be representation. Critics and historians, like Pliny and Vasari, then recorded with veneration the series of inventions from foreshortening through chiaroscuro that had made possible successively more…	en	https://artfulscientist.…d-atom1.jpg?w=32	The Artful Scientist	https://artfulscientist.home.blog/2019/06/04/thomas-kuhn-and-the-art-science-paradigm/	“For many centuries, both in antiquity and again in early modern Europe, painting was regarded as the cumulative discipline. During those years the artist’s goal was assumed to be representation. Critics and historians, like Pliny and Vasari, then recorded with veneration the series of inventions from foreshortening through chiaroscuro that had made possible successively more perfect representations of nature. But those are also the years, particularly during the Renaissance, when little cleavage was felt between the sciences and the arts.” –from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions As part of my endless quest to merge the arts/humanities and the sciences, I have taken another dive into the philosophy of science. I was first exposed to this world during my undergraduate degree. I took an introductory course in scientific philosophy that was , quite honestly, dead boring… but it featured a fabulous reading list! I’ve since let philosophy, particularly that of science, flow in and out of my life. I never got a degree in it, but that’s never stopped me from studying something I love! Now that I have access to the University of Edinburgh’s quaint philosophy library, I’m enjoying returning to some of these texts and wriggling around in falsifiability and paradigm shifts. The quote above positively leaped out at me from the page, but before I can properly explain what was so compelling about it, I need to describe a bit of Kuhn’s philosophy of scientific revolution. Thomas Kuhn defined the modern term paradigm. The word has its origin in the Greek paradigma, meaning pattern, example, or sample. In the philosophy of science, it refers to a set of practices and beliefs common to a discipline at any given moment in history. For example, for centuries the Earth was thought to be the center of the universe, with stars and planets revolving around us. This was the Ptolemaic system after the Greek astronomer Ptolemy. This is otherwise known a geocentric (Earth-centered) model of the universe. Until Nicolaus Copernicus’ heliocentric (sun-centered) model was accepted many years after his death, scientists largely agreed that the Earth was the center of everything. They were operating under a certain paradigm. Nowadays, we know that a geocentric universe is flat out inaccurate, but to early scientists without sophisticated tools, it was a perfectly effective answer to many questions, such as how the sun, moon, and stars appeared to slowly move through the sky. It also provided a set of acceptable questions, like how fast these objects move or where they’re positioned relative to the Earth and to each other. This is another important feature of a scientific paradigm. It is more than just the sum total of known information, it’s a pattern thinking that includes knowledge, beliefs, questions, and possible answers. Over time, paradigms start to accumulate anomalies, or findings that can’t be explained under that system. As anomalies pile up, paradigms undergo crises, or periods where the observations just don’t match the paradigm. Older scientists operating in that paradigm insist the paradigm must be right, and younger scientists begin to crave new answers to this contradictory data. Eventually, one or a series of breakthroughs results in a paradigm shift, when a new system of thought takes over. This is the cycle of scientific revolution, and it has repeated through the history of science. Newtonian mechanics adequately explained nearly all observations in physics in the 18th century, but as we later started exploring physics at higher velocities, larger mass, and greater distances, anomalies accumulated, until Albert Einstein proposed his theories of special and general relativity, effectively shifting the paradigm in the direction of modern physics. Similar paradigm-shifting discoveries were the theory evolution developed by Charles Darwin, Lavoisier’s theory of chemical reactions replacing the phlogiston theory of chemistry, and the acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics. These revolutions often took place years after the scientists involved have died, because scientists are reluctant to throw out the old paradigm. But eventually, the change is made, and scientists pursue new questions. An important feature of scientific revolutions that Kuhn emphasizes is that they are not merely a matter of people realizing they were wrong. On the contrary, each paradigm organically emerges as the best possible way to explain the natural world with the available tools and practices. Aristotelian physicists were no more wrong about physics than Newton. Rather, scientists from each period in history were using the best knowledge available. Paradigms are not information; they are broad collections of understandings that shape cultures and worldviews. So, to return to that quote from above…This is from the very last section of the book, after he has already explained every I describe in the last five paragraphs. Kuhn doesn’t devote much energy to connecting science and art other than here, but what he does provide ample food for thought. What paradigm are we in right now in terms of art and science? What are the acceptable connections? What are the acceptable practices? During the Renaissance, as Kuhn describes, visual art was far closer to what we consider a science today. There were well-defined goals for the practice, and techniques themselves were being invented and discovered just like different technologies and theories. This seems to be less true in the modern era, but is it? There continue to be scientific-style developments in the visual arts: New ways of rendering objects in computer graphics, photographic technology, and alternative ways of presenting visual information like virtual and augmented reality. What seems to have changed is the pattern of thinking surrounding these discoveries. The infamous art/science divide is nothing more than a paradigm constructed culturally, largely through the economics of funding certain activities (where the arts frequently suffer compared to the sciences) and the increased need for specialization as the tools of both art and science become more sophisticated. In past years, the paradigm was different. Art and science were considered more closely together. With the ample connections between art and science being observed by people like me, as well as put on display in scientific engagement contexts, we may be in the midst of a shift in paradigm. Science and art are returning to their related cultural state. But the important fact is that they were never actually so separated. The plates of the Earth still moved before plate tectonics was accepted. Though scientists positing other theories were not wrong according to Kuhn, this doesn’t change that there are underlying features of the world hidden beneath any given paradigm. To (perhaps erroneously) extend this analogy to science and art, this means that regardless of the pattern of thought surrounding these practices, they have always and will continue to have substantial overlap. The terms “science” and “art,” as well as the alleged division, are human inventions. A mere paradigm. And that is very comforting to me. I love philosophy. It’s good to be back.
7992	dbpedia	0	26	https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/physics/this-week-in-science-history-the-paradigm-shifter-dies/	en	The paradigm shifter dies	https://cosmosmagazine.c…20-kuhn-full.jpg	https://cosmosmagazine.c…20-kuhn-full.jpg	[ "https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/spai/ret_img/cosmosmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Cosmos_logo_white.svg", "https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/spai/q_lossy+ret_img+to_auto/cosmosmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/180620-kuhn-full.jpg", "https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/spai/ret_img/cosmosmagazine.com/wp-content/themes/cosmos/dist/images/placeholder-contributor.svg?v=ad4bdb6e", "https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/spai/q_lossy+ret_img+to_auto/cosmosmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Weekly-Catchup-300x250-1.png", "https://syndication.cosmosmagazine.com/?id=21520&title=The+paradigm+shifter+dies", "https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/spai/q_lossy+ret_img+to_auto/cosmosmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Weekly-Catchup-300x250-1.png", "https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/spai/ret_img/cosmosmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Cosmos_logo_white.svg", "https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/spai/q_lossy+ret_img+to_auto/cosmosmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Weekly-Catchup-300x250-1.png", "https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/spai/q_lossy+ret_img+to_auto/cosmosmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Weekly-Catchup-300x250-1.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2018-06-19T14:01:00+09:30	Physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn reframed our understanding scientific progress. Jeff Glorfeld reports.	en	https://cdn.shortpixel.a…n.svg?v=a905cf20	Cosmos	https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/physics/this-week-in-science-history-the-paradigm-shifter-dies/	As a budding young American scholar, Thomas Kuhn, who was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on July 18, 1922, studied physics at Harvard University, earning his first degree in 1943 and a master’s in 1946. But he found his true path in 1949, taking his PhD from Harvard in the history of science. His first book, The Copernican Revolution, from 1957, examines the development of the heliocentric theory of the solar system during the Renaissance. Kuhn’s interests in science and history led him into philosophy and to his second book, in 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy calls “one of the most cited academic books of all time”. In the book, Kuhn formulated his concept of “paradigm shift”. The Stanford authors explain how, through his study of science history, Kuhn had come to distrust the traditional perspective that science develops “by the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors … but progress itself is guaranteed by the scientific method.” Instead, he says science does not develop according to a set pattern, but has alternating “normal” and “revolutionary” phases. The revolutionary phases are not merely periods of accelerated progress, but differ qualitatively from normal science. In its entry on Kuhn, the Encyclopaedia Britannica explains his concept: “Scientific research and thought are defined by ‘paradigms’, or conceptual world-views, that consist of formal theories, classic experiments, and trusted methods. “Scientists typically accept a prevailing paradigm and try to extend its scope by refining theories, explaining puzzling data, and establishing more precise measures of standards and phenomena. Eventually, however, their efforts may generate insoluble theoretical problems or experimental anomalies that expose a paradigm’s inadequacies or contradict it altogether. “This accumulation of difficulties triggers a crisis that can only be resolved by an intellectual revolution that replaces an old paradigm with a new one. The overthrow of Ptolemaic cosmology by Copernican heliocentrism, and the displacement of Newtonian mechanics by quantum physics and general relativity, are both examples of major paradigm shifts.” The idea transformed scientific debate and modelling. To honour its influence, and that of its creator, the American Chemical Society each presents the “Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award” to a researcher who promulgates ideas that best challenge the status quo. Kuhn held professorial tenure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1979 until his retirement in 1991. He died on June 17, 1996, after a long battle with lung cancer.
7992	dbpedia	0	71	https://thomasjustinmemorial.com/tribute/details/1383/Jane-Kuhn/obituary.html	en	Obituary of Jane K. Kuhn \| Thomas-Justin Memorial	https://thomasjustinmemo…23/Jane-Kuhn.jpg	https://thomasjustinmemo…23/Jane-Kuhn.jpg	[ "https://thomasjustinmemorial.com/573/Full/levi-contact-btn.png", "https://thomasjustinmemorial.com/571/Full/Thomas-Justin_Memorial_Logo__3_.png", "https://thomasjustinmemorial.com/572/Full/TJFHVery_good_x.jpg", "https://thomasjustinmemorial.com/tribute-images/cropped/23/Jane-Kuhn.jpg", "https://thomasjustinmemorial.com/tribute-images/side-image/2782/Ultra/pixel.png", "https://thomasjustinmemorial.com/tribute-images/side-image/1813/Ultra/Remembrance_Store1.jpg", "https://thomasjustinmemorial.com/tribute-images/side-image/2782/Ultra/pixel.png", "https://thomasjustinmemorial.com/tribute-images/side-image/1813/Ultra/Remembrance_Store1.jpg", "https://thomasjustinmemorial.com/574/Full/blue-rect.png", "https://thomasjustinmemorial.com/568/Full/Thomas-Justin_Memorial_bottom.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "In memory of", "Jane K. Kuhn", "Obituary", "obit", "tribute", "notice", "death", "honor", "remember", "Funeral", "Cremation", "Thomas-Justin Memorial", "Cincinnati", "Ohio", "funeral homes in Cincinnati", "Cincinnati Funeral Homes", "funeral prices", "Cremation Cincinnati", "Funeral Services Cincinnati" ]	null	[]	null	Jane Hart Kuhn, 97, went to be with her Lord and Savior on 4/15/2022. She was born in Cincinnati, OH and spent most of her life there. She moved to G	en			https://thomasjustinmemorial.com/tribute/details/1383/Jane-Kuhn/obituary.html
7992	dbpedia	2	13	https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn	en	Thomas Samuel Kuhn	https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/psychology/images/9/9f/Thomas_Kuhn_by_Alexander_Bird.gif/revision/latest?cb=20060304121356	https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/psychology/images/9/9f/Thomas_Kuhn_by_Alexander_Bird.gif/revision/latest?cb=20060304121356	[ "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/psychology/images/9/9f/Thomas_Kuhn_by_Alexander_Bird.gif/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/250?cb=20060304121356", "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/6a181c72-e8bf-419b-b4db-18fd56a0eb60", "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/6c42ce6a-b205-41f5-82c6-5011721932e7", "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/464fc70a-5090-490b-b47e-0759e89c263f", "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/f7bb9d33-4f9a-4faa-88fe-2a0bd8138668" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Contributors to Psychology Wiki" ]	null	Assessment \| Biopsychology \| Comparative \| Cognitive \| Developmental \| Language \| Individual differences \| Personality \| Philosophy \| Social \| Methods \| Statistics \| Clinical \| Educational \| Industrial \| Professional items \| World psychology \| Philosophy Index: Aesthetics · Epistemology · Ethics...	en	/skins-ucp/mw139/common/favicon.ico	Psychology Wiki	https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn	Assessment \| Biopsychology \| Comparative \| Cognitive \| Developmental \| Language \| Individual differences \| Personality \| Philosophy \| Social \| Methods \| Statistics \| Clinical \| Educational \| Industrial \| Professional items \| World psychology \| Philosophy Index: Aesthetics · Epistemology · Ethics · Logic · Metaphysics · Consciousness · Philosophy of Language · Philosophy of Mind · Philosophy of Science · Social and Political philosophy · Philosophies · Philosophers · List of lists Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American intellectual who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the philosophy of science. Life[] Descendant of a [Jewish family, Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He obtained his bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943, his master's in 1946 and Ph.D. in 1949, and taught a course in the history of science there from 1948 until 1956 at the suggestion of Harvard president James Conant. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. In 1964 he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, and in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science. He was also awarded numerous honorary doctorates. He suffered cancer of the bronchial tubes for the last two years of his life and died Monday June 17 1996. He was survived by his wife Jehane R. Kuhn, his ex-wife Kathryn Muhs Kuhn, and their three children, Sarah, Elizabeth and Nathaniel. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)[] Thomas Kuhn is most famous for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) (1962) in which he presented the idea that science does not evolve gradually toward truth, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he calls "paradigm shifts." The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the revolution it brought about even in the vocabulary of the history of science: besides "paradigm shifts," Kuhn raised the word "paradigm" itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics to its current broader meaning, coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term "scientific revolutions" in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single "Scientific Revolution" in the late Renaissance. In France, Kuhn's conception of science has been related to Michel Foucault (with Kuhn's paradigm corresponding to Foucault's episteme) and Louis Althusser, although both are more concerned by the historical conditions of possibility of the scientific discourse - which Judith Butler calls "the limits of acceptable discourse". Thus, they do not consider science as isolated from society as they argue that Kuhn does. In contrast to Kuhn, Althusser's conception of science is that it is cumulative, even though this cumulativity is discontinuous (see his concept of "epistemological break") whereas Kuhn considers various paradigms as incommensurable. Bibliography[] The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957) Kuhn, T.S. (1961). The function of measurement in modern physical science. ISIS, 52, 161-193. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) (ISBN 0226458083) The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977) Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (Chicago, 1987) (ISBN 0226458008) The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) (ISBN 0226457982) See also[] Important publications in philosophy of science History and philosophy of science [] Thomas Kuhn (Biography, Outline of Structure of Scientific Revolutions) Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm (obituary by Lawrence Van Gelder, New York Times, 19 June 1996) Thomas S. Kuhn (obituary, The Tech p9 vol 116 no 28, 26 June 1996) Thomas Kuhn at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
7992	dbpedia	1	11	https://news.mit.edu/1996/kuhn	en	Prof. Thomas S. Kuhn of MIT, Noted Historian of Science, Dead at 73	https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico	https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico	[ "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg", "https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/src/img/placeholder/placeholder--frontpage--featured-news.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	1996-06-18T09:00:00+00:00		en	/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico	MIT News \| Massachusetts Institute of Technology	https://news.mit.edu/1996/kuhn	CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Professor Emeritus Thomas S. Kuhn of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the internationally known historian and philosopher who made seminal contributions to understanding how scientific views are supported and discounted over time, died Monday, June 17, at his home in Cambridge. He had been ill for the last two years with cancer of the bronchial tubes and throat. He was 73. Professor Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), an enormously influential work on the nature of scientific change, was widely celebrated as the central figure in contemporary thought about how the scientific process evolves. Earlier this month, for example, Vice President Albert Gore, delivering the June 7 commencement address at MIT, spoke of the relationship "between science and technology on the one hand and humankind and society on the other," and referred to "the great historian of science, Thomas Kuhn." Mr. Gore said Professor Kuhn "described the way in which our understanding of the world properly evolves when faced with a sudden increase in the amount of information. More precisely, he showed how well-established theories collapse under the weight of new facts and observations which cannot be explained, and then accumulate to the point where the once useful theory is clearly obsolete. As new facts continue to accumulate, a new threshold is reached at which a new pattern is suddenly perceptible and a new theory explaining this pattern emerges. It is an important process, not only at the societal level, but for each of us as individuals as we try to make sense of the growing mountain of information placed at our disposal." More than one million copies of Professor Kuhn's famous 1962 book have been printed. It exists in more than a dozen languages and continues to be a basic text in the study of the history of science and technology. From 1982 to 1991, when he became an emeritus professor, Dr. Kuhn held the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professorship in Philosophy. He was the chair's first holder. Jed Z. Buchwald, the Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and director of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, said Professor Kuhn "was the most influential historian and philosopher of science or our time. He instructed and inspired his students and colleagues at Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton and MIT, as well as the tens of thousands of scholars and students in his own and other fields of social science and the humanities who read his works." Professor Kuhn joined MIT in 1979 from Princeton University where he had been the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of the History of Science and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. At MIT, his work has centered on cognitive and linguistic processes that bear on the philosophy of science, including the influence of language on the development of science. Born in Cincinnati in 1922, Professor Kuhn studied physics at Harvard University, where he received the SB (1943), AM (1946) and PhD (1949). His shift from an interest in solid state physics to the history of science, was traceable to a "single 'Eureka!' moment in 1947," according to a 1991 Scientific American article. Professor Kuhn, the article says, "was working toward his doctorate in physics at Harvard University when he was asked to teach some science to undergraduate humanities majors. Searching for a simple case history that could illuminate the roots of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle's Physics and was astonished at how 'wrong' it was. How could someone so brilliant on other topics be so misguided in physics? Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the window of his dormitory room . . .when suddenly Aristotle 'made sense.' Kuhn realized that Aristotle's views of such basic concepts as motion and matter were totally unlike Newton's. Aristotle used the word 'motion,' for example, to refer not just to change in position but to change in general. . . . Understood on its own terms, Aristole's physics 'wasn't just bad Newton,' Kuhn says; it was just different." Professor Kuhn taught at Harvard and at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining Princeton in 1964. From 1978 to 1979 he was a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities. His honors included the Howard T. Behrman Award for distinguished achievements in the humanities (1977), the History of Science Society's George Sarton Medal (1982) and the Society for Social Studies of Science's John Desmond Bernal Award (1983). He became a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and was given honorary degrees by several universities throughout the world. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Philosophy of Science Association (president, 1988-90), and the History of Science Society (president, 1968-70). Professor Kuhn is survived by his wife, Jehane (Barton) Kuhn; two daughters, Sarah Kuhn-La Chance of Framingham, Mass., and Elizabeth Kuhn of Los Angles, and a son, Nathaniel Kuhn of Arlington, Mass. The service is private. A memorial service will be held at MIT in the fall.
7992	dbpedia	3	49	https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn	en	Thomas Samuel Kuhn	https://www.newworldency…avicon-32x32.png	https://www.newworldency…avicon-32x32.png	[ "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/images/nwe_header.jpg", "https://static.newworldencyclopedia.org/skins/common/images/Cc.logo.circle.png", "https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/resources/assets/poweredby_mediawiki_88x31.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	https://static.newworldencyclopedia.org/favicon.ico		https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn	Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions and innovations in the philosophy of science. More than a million copies of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, were printed, and it became the most studied and discussed text in philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had far reaching impacts on diverse fields of study beyond the philosophy of science, particularly on social sciences. Key concepts Kuhn presented in this work, such as "paradigm" and "incommensurability," became popular beyond academics. Life Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and his wife Minette Stroock Kuhn. The family was Jewish on both sides, although they were non-practicing. His father had been trained as a hydraulic engineer and had gone to Harvard. When he was six months old, the family moved to New York City, and the young Kuhn attended progressive schools there, and later in the upstate New York area. Kuhn entered Harvard University in 1940 and obtained his bachelor's degree in physics after three years in 1943, his master's in 1946 and Ph.D. in 1949. While there, primarily because of his editorship of the Harvard Crimson, he came to the attention of then Harvard president James Bryant Conant, and eventually gained Conant's sponsorship for becoming a Harvard Fellow. Conant would also be extremely influential in Kuhn’s career, encouraging him to write the book that would become The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first ed. published in 1962). After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California at Berkeley in both the philosophy and the history departments, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. Kuhn had entered Harvard as a physics major, intending to study theoretical physics. He did go on to get his degrees in physics. But as an undergraduate he took a course in philosophy and, although this was completely new to him, he was fascinated with it. He especially took to Kant. Later he would say that his own position was Kantian, but with movable categories. Sometime around 1947 Kuhn began teaching what had before been Conant’s course, “Understanding Science.” This course could be thought of as an elementary course in the history and philosophy of science. This led Kuhn to begin focusing on the history of science. He also had his “Eureka moment”—maybe better called an “Aristotle moment”—in the summer of 1947. As a 1991 article in Scientific American put it, Kuhn “was working toward his doctorate in physics at Harvard …when he was asked to teach some science to undergraduate humanities majors. Searching for a simple case history that could illuminate the roots of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle's Physics and was astonished at how ‘wrong’ it was [when understood in Newtonian terms]… Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the window of his dormitory room… when suddenly Aristotle ‘made sense.’” Concerning what he found in Aristotle, Kuhn wrote, “How could [Aristotle’s] characteristic talents have deserted his so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had so deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? Those questions troubled me. I could easily believe that Aristotle had stumbled, but not that, on entering physics, he had totally collapsed. Might not the fault be mine, rather than Aristotle’s, I asked myself. Perhaps his words had not always meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine” (The Road Since Structure, 16). Kuhn reported that, in his window-gazing, “Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together.” As the Scientific American article put it, “Kuhn … realized that Aristotle's views of such basic concepts as motion and matter were totally unlike Newton's… Understood on its own terms, Aristotle's Physics ‘wasn't just bad Newton,’ Kuhn says; it was just different.” This insight would go on to underlie most of his subsequent work in history and philosophy of science. Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, and in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science. He was also awarded numerous honorary doctorates. Kuhn suffered cancer of the bronchial tubes for the last two years of his life and died Monday, June 17, 1996. He was survived by his wife Jehane R. Kuhn, his ex-wife Kathryn Muhs Kuhn, and their three children, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Nathaniel. The Copernican Revolution (1957) In his lifetime, Kuhn published more than a hundred papers and reviews, as well as five books (the fifth published posthumously). His first book—he had already published a few papers and reviews in various journals—was The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Harvard University Press, 1957), with a forward by Conant. This book began out of lectures he had given to the students at Harvard, and was completed after he went to Berkeley. It may be seen as a prolegomena to his later and most important, and far more influential, book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in that in Copernican Revolution Kuhn introduced a number of the points that would be further developed in the later book. Kuhn emphasized that the Copernican Revolution “event was plural. Its core was a transformation of mathematical astronomy, but it embraced conceptual changes in cosmology, physics, philosophy, and religion as well.” The Copernican revolution, Kuhn clamed, shows “how and with what effect the concepts of many different fields are woven into a single fabric of thought.” And “…filiations between distinct fields of thought appear in the period after the publication of Copernicus’ work. …[This work] could only be assimilated by men able to create a new physics, a new conception of space, and a new idea of man’s relation to God. …Specialized accounts [of the Copernican Revolution] are inhibited both by aim and method from examining the nature of these ties and their effects upon the growth of human knowledge.” Kuhn claimed that this effort to show the Copernican Revolution’s plurality is “probably the book’s most important novelty.” But also it is novel in that it “repeatedly violates the institutional boundaries which separate the audience for ‘science’ from the audience for ‘history’ or ‘philosophy.’ Occasionally it may seem to be two books, one dealing with science, the other with intellectual history.” The seven chapters of Copernican Revolution deal with what Kuhn called “The Ancient Two-Sphere Universe,” “The Problem of the Planets [in Ptolemaic cosmology],” “The Two-Sphere Universe in Aristotelian Thought,” “Recasting the Tradition: Aristotle to Copernicus,” “Copernicus’ Innovation,” “The Assimilation of Copernican Astronomy,” and “The New Universe” as it came to be understood after the revolution in thinking. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first ed. 1962), Kuhn claimed that science does not evolve gradually toward truth, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he called "paradigm shifts." Ironically, this book was originally printed as a volume in the International Encyclopedia for Unified Science, which was conceived and published by the Vienna circle—the logical positivists. It is ironic because Kuhn seemed to be an arch anti-positivist (although that claim about him came to be doubted in the 1990s). The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured by the revolution it brought about even in the vocabulary of the history and philosophy of science. Besides “paradigm” and “paradigm shifts,” Kuhn coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term “scientific revolutions” in the plural, taking place at different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single "Scientific Revolution" in the late Renaissance. Kuhn began this book by declaring that there should be a role for history in theory of science, and that this can produce a “decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” Moreover, the textbooks used to teach the next generation of scientists, offer “a concept of science … no more likely to fit the enterprise that produced them than an image of a national culture drawn from a tourist brochure or a language text” (p. 1). He also declared that “methodological directives” are insufficient “to dictate a unique substantive conclusion to many sorts of scientific questions” (3). Next, Kuhn introduced his notion of “normal science” and said that it “means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice” (10). These achievements can be called “paradigms,” a term much used by Kuhn and a central point of Kuhn’s theory—for better or worse. Paradigms, according to Kuhn, are essential to science. “In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant” (15). Moreover, “no natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism” (16-17). “Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute.” Normal science, then, is a puzzle-solving activity consisting of mopping-up activities, guided by the reigning paradigm. “Rules derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide science even in the absence of rules” (42). “Normal research, which is cumulative, owes its success to the ability of scientists regularly to select problems that can be solved with conceptual and instrumental techniques close to those already in existence" (96). Over time, however, new and unsuspected phenomena—anomalies—are uncovered by scientific research, things that will not fit into the reigning paradigm. When a sufficient failure of normal science to solve the emerging anomalies occurs, a crises results, and this eventually leads to the emergence of a new scientific theory, a revolution. A reorientation occurs that breaks with one tradition and introduces a new one. Kuhn stated that the new paradigm is incompatible and incommensurable with the old one. Such “scientific revolutions are … non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one” (92). This crisis and its accompanying revolution lead to a division of camps and polarization within the science, with one camp striving to hold onto and defend the old paradigm or institutional constellation, while the other upholds and seeks to have the new one replace the old one. “That difference [between competing paradigms] could not occur if the two were logically compatible. In the process of being assimilated, the second must displace the first” (97). Moreover, proponents of the two cannot really speak with each other, for “To the extent … that two scientific schools disagree about what is a problem and what is a solution, they will inevitably talk through each other when debating the relative merits of their respective paradigms” (109). Scientific revolutions amount to changes of world view. Scientific revolutions, Kuhn claied, tend to be invisible because they “have customarily been viewed not as revolutions but as additions to scientific knowledge” (136). This is primarily because of textbooks, which “address themselves to an already articulated body of problems, data, and theory, most often to the particular set of paradigms to which the scientific community is committed at the time they are written.” Textbooks, popularizations, and philosophy of science all “record the stable outcome of past revolutions” and are “systematically misleading” (137). “Textbooks … are produced only in the aftermath of a scientific revolution. They are the bases for a new tradition of normal science” (144). Moreover, “depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession” (138). Although it may superficially resemble or mimic them, neither verification, as claimed by the positivists, nor falsification, as propounded by Popper, are the methods by which theory change actually occurs. Instead, Kuhn claimed, something resembling religious conversion happens. A new paradigm first needs a few supporters—usually younger people who are not committed or beholden to the older one. “Probably the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they can solve the problems that have led the old one to a crisis” (153). The main issue in circumstances of competing paradigms is “which paradigm will in the future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely (157). Because of that “a decision is called for” (157) and “in the circumstances that decision must be based less on past achievement than future promise” (157-158). But Kuhn denied that “new paradigms triumph ultimately through some mystical aesthetic” (158). The remaining central question for growth of scientific knowledge is, Kuhn acknowledged, “Why should the enterprise [he sketches in his theory] … move steadily ahead in ways that, say, art, political theory, or philosophy does not” (160). He suggested that the answer is partly semantic because, “To a very great extent the term ‘science’ is reserved for fields that do progress in obvious ways.” This is shown "in the recurrent debates about whether one or another of the contemporary social sciences is really a science” (160). Kuhn declared that “we tend to see as science any field in which progress is marked” (162). “It is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assured” (163). But, he asked, “Why should progress also be the apparently universal concomitant of scientific revolutions?” He answered that “Revolutions close with a total victory for one of the opposing camps. Will that group ever say that the result of its victory has been something less than progress? That would be rather like admitting that they had been wrong and their opponents right” (166). “The very existence of science,” he wrote, “depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community” (167). And, “a group of this sort must see a paradigm change as progress” (169). But Kuhn denied that a paradigm change of the kind he describes leads toward the truth. “We may … have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes in paradigms carry scientists and those who learn from them closer to the truth” (170). But this is no great loss because, he asked, “Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal? If we can learn to substitute evolution-from-what-we-do-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know, a number of very vexing problems may vanish in the process” (171). Moreover, “the entire process may have occurred, as we now suppose biological evolution did, without benefit of a set goal, a permanent fixed scientific truth, of which each stage in the development of scientific knowledge is a better example” (172-173). Criticism of Kuhn Many people responded to Kuhn’s work, and the responses ranged from extremely favorable to highly critical. Dudley Shapere gave a harshly critical review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in Philosophical Review 73 (1964). W.V.O. Quine wrote that Kuhn's work contributed to a wave of “epistemological nihilism.” Quine continued, "This mood is reflected in the tendency of … Kuhn … to belittle the role of evidence and to accentuate cultural relativism"(Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, p. 87). Some people praised Kuhn’s opening to consideration of the sociology and psychology of science. Others—Karl Popper, for an important example—condemned this as a prostitution, or at least severe misrepresentation, of science. Some claimed that Kuhn’s work was progressive in that it opened the door to a new and fresh understanding of what science is and how it operates. But Steve Fuller, in Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, claimed that Kuhn’s work is reactionary because Kuhn tried to remove science from public examination and democratic control. One of the most important and influential examinations of Kuhn’s work took place at the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, held at Bedford College, Regent’s Park, London, on July 11-17, 1965, with Popper presiding. The proceedings are gathered in a book entitled Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. In that colloquium, John Watkins argued against normal science. Steven Toulmin asked whether the distinction between normal and revolutionary science holds water. Margaret Masterman pointed out that Kuhn’s use of “paradigm” was highly plastic—she showed more than twenty different usages. L. Pearce Williams claimed that few, if any, scientists recorded in the history of science were "normal" scientists in Kuhn’s sense; i.e. Williams disagreed with Kuhn both about historical facts and about what is characteristic for science. Others then and since have argued that Kuhn was mistaken in claiming that two different paradigms are incompatible and incommensurable because, in order for things to be incompatible, they must be directly comparable or commensurable. Popper himself admitted that Kuhn had caused him to notice the existence of normal science, but Popper regarded normal science as deplorable because, Popper claimed, it is unimaginative and plodding. He pointed out that Kuhn’s theory of science growing through revolutions fits only some sciences because some other sciences have in fact been cumulative—a point made by numerous other critics of Kuhn. In addition, Popper claimed that Kuhn really does have a logic of scientific discovery: The logic of historical relativism. He and others pointed out that in claiming that a new paradigm is incommensurable and incompatible with an older one Kuhn was mistaken because, Popper claimed, “a critical comparison of the competing theories, of the competing frameworks, is always possible.” (Popper sometimes called this the "myth of the framework.") Moreover, Popper continued, “In science (and only in science) can we say that we have made genuine progress: That we know more than we did before” (Lakatos & Musgrave, 57). Kuhn responded in an essay entitled “Reflections on my Critics.” In it he discussed further the role of history and sociology, the nature and functions of normal science, the retrieval of normal science from history, irrationality and theory choice, and the question of incommensurability and paradigms. Among many other things, he claimed that his account of science, notwithstanding some of his critics, did not sanction mob rule; that it was not his view that “adoption of a new scientific theory is an intuitive or mystical affair, a matter for psychological description rather than logical or methodological codification” (Lakaos & Musgrave, 261) as, for example, Israel Scheffler had claimed in his book Science and Subjectivity—a claim that has been made against Kuhn by numerous other commentators, especially David Stove—and that translation (from one paradigm or theory to another) always involves a theory of translation and that the possibility of translation taking place does not make the term “conversion” inappropriate (Lakatos & Musgrave, 277). Kuhn’s work (and that of many other philosophers of science) was examined in The Structure of Scientific Theories, ed. with a Critical Introduction by Frederick Suppe. There Kuhn published an important essay entitled “Second Thoughts on Paradigms” in which he admitted that his use of that term had been too plastic and indefinite and had caused confusion, and he proposed replacing it with “disciplinary matrix.” (Suppe, 463) In an “Afterward” to the 1977 Second Edition of this work, Suppe claimed that there had been a waning of the influence of what he dubbed the Weltanschauungen views of science such as that of Kuhn. Examination and criticism of Kuhn's work—pro and con, with the con side dominant among philosophers, but the pro side tending to be supported by sociologists of science and by deconstructionists and other irrationalists—continues into the twenty first century. Kuhn is frequently attacked as a purveyor of irrationalism and of the view that science is a subjective enterprise with no objective referent—a view Kuhn strongly denied that he held or supported. One problem is that Kuhn tended to complain that his critics misunderstood and misrepresented him and that he did not hold what they represented him as holding—even though they could point to passages in which he seemed to say explicitly what they claimed he held—but he did not give them much in response that would serve to show that they were wrong or that he actually held to any defensible form of scientific rationalism. Since he gave up the notion of an external referent or “ultimate truth” as the aim or goal of science, it was nearly impossible for him to specify anything except a completely conventionalist account of growth or progress in scientific knowledge. On the question of Kuhn's relationship to logical positivism (or logical empiricism), George Reisch—in a 1991 essay entitled “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?”—argued that Kuhn did not do so because there were two previously unpublished letters from Rudolf Carnap (Carnap was regarded by most observers as being the strongest, most important, or arch-logical positivist) to Kuhn in which Carnap expressed strong approval of Kuhn’s work, suggesting that there was a closer relationship between Kuhn and logical positivism than had been previously recognized. "Post-Kuhnian" philosophy of science produced extensive responses to and critiques of the apparently relativistic and skeptical implications of Kuhn's work—implications Kuhn himself disowned. But, as noted above, Kuhn's disowning of those implications is puzzling and perhaps even disingenuous, given what Kuhn actually wrote on those topics. Kuhn’s work after Structure Kuhn published three additional books after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. They were The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977), Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894-1912 (1978; 1984; and reprinted in 1987 with an afterword, “Revisiting Planck”), and The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview (Ed. by James Conant and John Haugeland, published posthumously, 2000). Subsequent editions of The Copernican Revolution were published in 1959, 1966, and 1985. A second revised edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1970, and a third edition in 1996. Essential Tension and The Road Since Structure were mostly collections of previously published essays, except that Road contains a long and informative interview-discussion with him conducted in Athens, Greece, on October 19-21, 1995, by three Greek interviewers; the occasion was the awarding of an honorary doctorate by the Department of Philosophy and History of Philosophy by the University of Athens and a symposium there in his honor. Understandably, given the importance of Structure and the enormous outpouring of interest and criticism it provoked, almost all of Kuhn's work after it consisted of further discussions and defenses of things he had written, responses to critics, and some modifications of positions he had taken. During his professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kuhn worked in linguistics. That may not have been an especially important or productive aspect of his work. But in his response "Reflections on my Critics," especially section 6 entitled "Incommensurability and Paradigms," where he wrote "At last we arrive at the central constellation of issues which separate me from most of my critics," Kuhn wrote about linguistic issues, and that set of problems or issues may have been the focus of his later work at MIT. Understanding of Kuhn's work in Europe In France, Kuhn's conception of science has been related to Michel Foucault (with Kuhn's paradigm corresponding to Foucault's episteme) and Louis Althusser, although both are more concerned by the historical conditions of possibility of the scientific discourse. (Foucault, in fact, was most directly influenced by Gaston Bachelard, who had developed independently a view of the history of scientific change similar to Kuhn's, but—Kuhn claimed—too rigid.) Thus, they do not consider science as isolated from society as they argue that Kuhn does. In contrast to Kuhn, Althusser's conception of science is that it is cumulative, even though this cumulativity is discontinuous (see his concept of Louis Althusser's "epistemological break") whereas Kuhn considers various paradigms as incommensurable. Kuhn's work has also been extensively used in social science; for instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International Relations. References ISBN links support NWE through referral fees Primary Sources (In chronological order) Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957, 1959, 1965. —The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. —The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977. —Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. —The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993. Ed. by James Conant and John Haugeland Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. (This book contains a complete bibliography of Kuhn's writings and other presentations.) Secondary Sources Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton: Princeton University Press and Acumen Press, 2000. Einstein, Albert and Leopold Infeld. The Evolution of Physics New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938. Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Lakatos, Imre and Alan Musgrave, Eds, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. London: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Lakatos, Imre and Paul Feyerabend. For and Against Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Quine, W.V. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Raymo, Chet. “A New Paradigm for Thomas Kuhn,” Scientific American. September, 2000. Reisch, George. “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?” Philosophy of Science 58 (1991). Rothman, Milton A. A Physicist's Guide to Skepticism. Prometheus, 1988. Sardar, Ziauddin. Thomas Kuhn and the Science Wars. Totem Books, 2000. Scheffler, Israel. Science and Subjectivity. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1967 Shapere, Dudley. “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Philosophical Review. 73, 1964. (A review of Kuhn's book.) Stove, David. Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult. Transaction Publishers, 2001. Suppe, Frederick. The Structure of Scientific Theories, Second Ed. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977 Wolpert, Lewis. The Unnatural Nature of Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. All links retrieved April 30, 2023. Thomas Kuhn, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. General Philosophy Sources
7992	dbpedia	2	25	https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn.html	en	Thomas Kuhn			[ "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/extensions/FlaggedRevs/client/img/2.png", "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/extensions/FlaggedRevs/client/img/arrow-down.png", "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/images/thumb/Information.svg/20px-Information.svg.png", "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/skins/vector/images/search-ltr34ed.png?301", "https://www.theochem.ru.nl/~pwormer/Knowino/knowino.org/w/skins/common/images/poweredby_mediawiki_88x31.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	../favicon.html		null	From Knowino Jump to: navigation, search Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1921 – June 22, 1996) was an American philosopher and historian of science. His most famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, revolutionized the philosophy of science and has become one of the most cited academic books of all time. His contribution to the philosophy of science marked a break with key positivist doctrines and began a new style of philosophy of science that brought it much closer to the history of science. The general thrust of his book is that science operates on the model of paradigms which are clung to until a scientific revolution or paradigm shift happens. As examples, he used the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, as well as the shift from pre-Darwinian to post-Darwinian biology. "... while Kuhn thus opened up the entire domain of science for political analysis, he argued that the behaviorally visible mark of a truly scientific community was its high degree of autonomy, its ability to exercise authority over its own intellectual affairs. He confirmed the instinct that science was really different. But he also showed that scientists, within their domain, behaved very much like the rest of us." – David Hollinger, writing in the New York Times.[1] [edit] Kuhn's life and career Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He was awarded a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943 graduating summa cum laude, and spent the remaining war years at Harvard researching into radar. He gained a master's degree in 1946, and a PhD in physics in 1949 for a thesis concerned an application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics. From 1948 until 1956 he taught a course in the history of science at Harvard, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department. There, he wrote and published (in 1962), at the age of forty, his major work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Most of his subsequent career was spent in articulating and developing the ideas developed within it. In 1964 he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1978 he published Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 and in 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In 1982 he was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. In 1994 he was diagnosed with cancer of the bronchial tubes; he died in 1996.[2] [edit] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions For more information, see: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (book). [edit] Notes ↑ Paradigms Lost, David Hollinger, writing in the New York Times, May 28, 2000 ↑ Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm The New York Times, June 19, 1996, Obituary By Lawrence Van Gelder; Fullmer JZ (1998) Memorial. Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)Technology and Culture 139:372-7
7992	dbpedia	1	70	https://www.gongwer.com/directories/bio.cfm%3Fnameid%3D716801	en	Gongwer News Service	https://www.gongwer.com/…avicon-32x32.png	https://www.gongwer.com/…avicon-32x32.png	[ "https://www.gongwer.com/programming/images/gongwer-michigan.png", "https://www.gongwer.com/programming/images/gongwer-michigan.png", "https://www.gongwer.com/programming/images/gongwer-michigan.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	/apple-touch-icon.png		null	Capitol News Get unparalleled coverage of Michigan power brokers, policy making and elections with Gongwer's in-depth reporting. Gongwer takes you under the dome, in the chambers and committee rooms to keep you updated on policies that impact you, your clients or your members.
7992	dbpedia	0	1	https://iep.utm.edu/kuhn-ts/	en	Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy	https://iep.utm.edu/wp-c…png?v=XBrrnd5baw	https://iep.utm.edu/wp-c…png?v=XBrrnd5baw	[ "https://iep.utm.edu/wp-content/media/iep-logo-1.png", "https://iep.utm.edu/wp-content/media/kuhn.jpg", "https://iep.utm.edu/wp-content/media/Facebook.png", "https://iep.utm.edu/wp-content/media/X-1.png", "https://iep.utm.edu/wp-content/media/Feed.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	/wp-content/media/fbrfg/apple-touch-icon.png?v=XBrrnd5baw		https://iep.utm.edu/kuhn-ts/	Thomas S. Kuhn (1922—1996) Thomas Samuel Kuhn, although trained as a physicist at Harvard University, became an historian and philosopher of science through the support of Harvard’s president, James Conant. In 1962, Kuhn’s renowned The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Structure) helped to inaugurate a revolution—the 1960s historiographic revolution—by providing a new image of science. For Kuhn, scientific revolutions involved paradigm shifts that punctuated periods of stasis or normal science. Towards the end of his career, however, Kuhn underwent a paradigm shift of his own—from a historical philosophy of science to an evolutionary one. In this article, Kuhn’s philosophy of science is reconstructed chronologically. To that end, the following questions are entertained: What was Kuhn’s early life and career? What was the road towards Structure? What is Structure? Why did Kuhn revise Structure? What was the road Kuhn took after Structure? At the heart of the answers to these questions is the person of Kuhn himself, especially the intellectual and social context in which he practiced his trade. This chronological reconstruction of Kuhn’s philosophy begins with his work in the 1950s on physical theory in the Lowell lectures and on the Copernican revolution and ends with his work in the 1990s on an evolutionary philosophy of science. Rather than present Kuhn’s philosophy as a finished product, this approach endeavors to capture it in the process of its formation so as to represent it accurately and faithfully. Table of Contents Early Life and Career The Road to Structure The Lowell Lectures The Copernican Revolution The Last Mile to Structure The Structure of Scientific Revolutions The Road after Structure Historical and Historiographic Studies Metahistorical Studies Evolutionary Philosophy of Science Conclusion References and Further Reading Kuhn’s Work Secondary Sources 1. Early Life and Career Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 18 July 1922. He was the first of two children born to Samuel L. and Minette (neè Stroock) Kuhn, with a brother Roger born several years later. His father was a native Cincinnatian and his mother a native New Yorker. Kuhn’s father, Sam, was a hydraulic engineer, trained at Harvard University and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) prior to World War I. He entered the war, and served in the Army Corps of Engineers. After leaving the armed services, Sam returned to Cincinnati for several years before moving to New York to help his recently widowed mother Setty (neè Swartz) Kuhn. Kuhn’s mother, Minette, was a liberally educated person who came from an affluent family. Kuhn’s early education reflected the family’s liberal progressiveness. In 1927, Kuhn began schooling at the progressive Lincoln School in Manhattan. His early education taught him to think independently, but by his own admission, there was little content to the thinking. He remembered that by the second grade, for instance, he was unable to read proficiently, much to the consternation of his parents. Beginning in the sixth grade, Kuhn’s family moved to Croton-on-Hudson, a small town about fifty miles from Manhattan, and the adolescent Kuhn attended the progressive Hessian Hills School. According to Kuhn the school was staffed by left-oriented radical teachers, who taught the students pacifism. When he left the school after the ninth grade, Kuhn felt he was a bright and independent thinker. After spending an uninspired year at the preparatory school Solebury in Pennsylvania, Kuhn spent his last two years of high school at the Yale-preparatory Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. He graduated third in his class of 105 students and was inducted into the National Honor Society. He also received the prestigious Rensselaer Alumni Association Medal. Kuhn matriculated to Harvard College in the fall of 1940, following his father’s and uncles’ footsteps. At Harvard, he acquired a better sense of himself socially by participating in various organizations. During his first year, Kuhn took a yearlong philosophy course. In the first semester, he studied Plato and Aristotle; while in the second semester, he studied Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant. He intended to take additional philosophy courses but could not find time. He attended, however, several of George Sarton’s lectures on the history of science, but he found them boring. At Harvard, Kuhn agonized over majoring in either physics or mathematics. After seeking his father’s counsel, he chose physics because of career opportunities. Interestingly, the attraction of physics or mathematics was their problem-solving traditions. In the fall of his sophomore year, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Kuhn expedited his undergraduate education by going to summer school. The physics department focused on teaching predominantly electronics, and Kuhn followed suit. Kuhn underwent another radical transformation, also during his sophomore year. Although he was trained a pacifist the atrocities perpetrated in Europe during World War II, especially by Hitler, horrified him. Kuhn experienced a crisis, since he was unable to defend pacifism reasonably. The outcome was that he became an interventionist, which was the position of many at Harvard—especially its president, Conant. The episode left a lasting impact upon him. In a Harvard Crimson editorial, Kuhn supported Conant’s effort to militarize the universities in the United States. The editorial came to the attention of the administration, and eventually Conant and Kuhn met. In the spring of 1943, Kuhn graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with an S.B. After graduation, he worked for the Radio Research Laboratory located in Harvard’s biology building. He conducted research on radar counter technology, under John van Vleck’s supervision. The job procured for Kuhn a deferment from the draft. After a year, he requested a transfer to England and then to the continent, where he worked in association with the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. The trip was Kuhn’s first abroad and he felt invigorated by the experience. However, Kuhn realized that he did not like radar work, which led him to reconsider whether he wanted to continue as a physicist. But, these doubts did not dampen his enthusiasm for or belief in science. During this time, Kuhn had the opportunity to read what he wanted; he read in the philosophy of science, including authors such as Bertrand Russell, P.W. Bridgman, Rudolf Carnap, and Philipp Frank. After V.E. day in 1945, Kuhn returned to Harvard. As the war abated with the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan, Kuhn activated an earlier acceptance into graduate school and began studies in the physics department. Although Kuhn persuaded the department to permit him to take philosophy courses during his first year, he again chose the pragmatic course and focused on physics. In 1946, Kuhn passed the general examinations and received a master’s degree in physics. He then began dissertation research on theoretical solid-state physics, under the direction of van Vleck. In 1949, Harvard awarded Kuhn a doctorate in physics. Although Kuhn had high regard for science, especially physics, he was unfulfilled as a physicist and continually harbored doubts during graduate school about a career in physics. He had chosen both a dissertation topic and an advisor to expedite obtaining a degree. But, he was to find direction for his career through Conant’s invitation in 1947 to help prepare a historical case-based course on science for upper-level undergraduates. Kuhn accepted the invitation to be one of two assistants for Conant’s course. He undertook a project investigating the origins of seventeenth-century mechanics, a project that would transform his image of science. That transformation came, as Kuhn recounted later, on a summer day in 1947 as he struggled to understand Aristotle’s idea of motion in Physics. The problem was that Kuhn tried to make sense of Aristotle’s idea of motion using Newtonian assumptions and categories of motion. Once he realized that he had to read Aristotle’s Physics using assumptions and categories contemporary to when the Greek philosopher wrote it, suddenly Aristotle’s idea of motion made sense. After this experience, Kuhn realized that he wanted to be a philosopher of science by doing history of science. His interest was not strictly history of science but philosophy, for he felt that philosophy was the way to truth and truth was what he was after. To achieve that goal, Kuhn asked Conant to sponsor him as a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. Harvard initiated the society to provide promising young scholars freedom from teaching for three years to develop a scholarly program. Kuhn’s colleagues stimulated him professionally, especially a senior fellow by the name of Willard Quine. At the time, Quine was publishing his critique on the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic, which Kuhn found reassuring for his own thinking. Kuhn began as a fellow in the fall of 1948, which provided him the opportunity to retool as a historian of science. Kuhn took advantage of the opportunity and read widely over the next year and a half in the humanities and sciences. Just prior to his appointment as a fellow, Kuhn was also undergoing psychoanalysis. This experience allowed him to see other people’s perspectives and contributed to his approach for conducting historical research. 2. The Road to Structure a. The Lowell Lectures In 1950, the trustee of the Lowell Institute, Ralph Lowell, invited Kuhn to deliver the 1951 Lowell lectures. In these lectures, Kuhn outlined a conception of science in contrast to the traditional philosophy of science’s conception in which facts are slowly accumulated and stockpiled in textbooks. Kuhn began by assuring his audience that he, as a once practicing scientist, believed that science produces useful and cumulative knowledge of the world, but that traditional analysis of science distorts the process by which scientific knowledge develops. He went on to inform the audience that the history of science could be instructive for identifying the process by which creative science advances, rather than focusing on the finished product promulgated in textbooks. Because textbooks only state the immutable scientific laws and marshal forth the experimental evidence to support those laws, they cover over the creative process that leads to the laws in the first place. Kuhn then presented an alternative historical approach to scientific methodology. He claimed that the traditional position in which Galileo rejected Aristotle’s physics because of Galileo’s experiments is a fallacy. Rather, Galileo rejected Aristotelianism as an entire system. In other words, Galileo’s evidence was necessary but not sufficient; rather, the Aristotelian system was under evaluation, which also included its logic. Next, Kuhn proposed an alternative image of science based on the new approach to the history of science. He introduced the notion of conceptual frameworks, and drew from psychology to defend the advancement of science though scientists’ predispositions. These predispositions allow scientists to negotiate a professional world and to learn from their experiences. Moreover, they are important in organizing the scientist’s professional world and scientists do not dispense with them easily. Change in them represents a foundational alteration in a professional world. Kuhn argued that although logic is important for deriving meaning and for managing and manipulating knowledge, scientific language—as natural—outstrips such formalization. He upended the tables on an important tool for the traditional analysis of science. By revealing the limitations of logical analysis, he showed that logic is necessary but insufficient for justifying scientific knowledge. Logic, then, cannot guarantee the traditional image of science as the progressive accumulation of scientific facts. Kuhn next examined logical analysis in terms of language and meaning. His position was that language is a way of dissecting the professional world in which scientists operate. But, there is always ambiguity or overlap in the meaning of terms as that world is dissected. Certainly, scientists attempt to increase the precision of their terms but not to the point that they can eliminate ambiguity. Kuhn concluded by distinguishing between creative and textbook science. In the same year of the Lowell lectures, Harvard appointed Kuhn as an instructor and the following year as an assistant professor. Kuhn’s primary teaching duty was in the general education curriculum, where he taught Natural Sciences 4 along with Leonard Nash. He also taught courses in the history of science. And, it was during this time that Kuhn developed a course on the history of cosmology. Kuhn utilized course preparation for scholarly writing projects. For example, he handed out draft chapters of The Copernican Revolution to his classes. A part of Kuhn’s motivation for developing a new image of science was the misconceptions of science held by the public. He blamed its misconceptions on introductory courses that stressed the textbook image of science as a fixed body of facts. After discussing this state of affairs with friends and Conant, Kuhn provided students with a more accurate image of science. The key to that image, claimed Kuhn, was science’s history, which displays the creative and dynamic nature of science. b. The Copernican Revolution In The Copernican Revolution, Kuhn claimed he had identified an important feature of the revolution, which previous scholars had missed: its plurality. What Kuhn meant by plurality was that scientists have philosophical and even religious commitments, which are important for the justification of scientific knowledge. This stance was anathema to traditional philosophers of science, who believed that such commitments played little—if any—role in the justification of scientific knowledge and relegated them to the discovery process. Kuhn began reconstruction of the Copernican revolution by establishing the genuine scientific character of ancient cosmological conceptual schemes, especially the two-sphere cosmology composed of an inner sphere for the earth and an outer sphere for the heavens. For Kuhn, conceptual schemes exhibit three important features. They are comprehensive in terms of scientific predictions, there is no final proof for them, and they are derived from other schemes. Finally, to be successful conceptual schemes must perform logical and psychological functions. The logical function is expressed in explanatory terms, while the psychological function in existential terms. Although the logical function of the two-sphere cosmology continued to be problematic, its psychological function afforded adherents a comprehensive worldview that included even religious elements. The major logical problem with the two-sphere cosmology was the movement and positions of the planets. The conceptual scheme Ptolemy developed in the second century guided research for the next millennium. But, problems surfaced with the scheme and predecessors could only correct it so far with ad hoc modifications. Kuhn asked at this point in the narrative why the Ptolemaic system, given its imperfection, was not overthrown sooner. The answer, for Kuhn, depended on a distinction between the logical and psychological dimensions of scientific revolutions. According to Kuhn, there are logically different conceptual schemes that can organize and account for observations. The difference among these schemes is their predictive power. Consequently, if an observation is made that is not compatible with a prediction the scheme must be replaced. But, before change can occur, there is also the psychological dimension to a revolution. Copernicus had to overcome not only the logical dimension of the Ptolemaic system but also its psychological dimension. Aristotle had established this latter dimension by wedding the two-sphere cosmology to a philosophical system. Through the Aristotelian notion of motion among the earthly and heavenly spheres, the inner sphere was connected and depended on the outer sphere. The ability to presage future events linked astronomy to astrology. Such an alliance, according to Kuhn, provided a formidable obstacle to change of any kind. But change began to take place, albeit slowly. From Aristotle to Ptolemy, a sharp distinction arose between the psychological dimensions of cosmology and the mathematical precision of astronomy. By Ptolemy’s time, astronomy was less concerned with the psychological dimensions of data interpretation and more with the accuracy of theoretical prediction. To some extent, this aided Copernicus, since whether the earth moved could be determined by theoretical analysis of the empirical data. But still, the earth as center of the universe gave existential consolation to people. The strands of the Copernican revolution, then, included not only astronomical concerns but also theological, economic, and social ones. Besides the Scholastic tradition, with its impetus theory of motion, other factors also paved the way for the Copernican revolution, including the Protestant revolution, navigation for oceanic voyages, calendar reform, and Renaissance humanism and Neoplatonism. Copernicus, according to Kuhn, was the immediate inheritor of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmological tradition and, except for the position of the earth, was closer to that tradition than to modern astronomy. For Kuhn, De Revolutionibus precipitated a revolution and was not the revolution itself. Although the problem Copernicus addressed was the same as for his predecessors, that is, planetary motion, his solution was to revise the mathematical model for that motion by making the earth a planet that moves around the sun. Essentially, Copernicus maintained the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic universe but exchanged the sun for the earth, as the universe’s center. Although Copernicus had eliminated major epicycles, he still used minor ones and the accuracy of planetary position was no better than Ptolemy’s. Kuhn concluded that Copernicus did not really solve the problem of planetary motion. Initially, according to Kuhn, there were only a few supporters of Copernicus’ cosmology. Although the majority of astronomers accepted the mathematical harmonies of De Revolutionibus after its publication in 1543, they rejected or ignored its cosmology. Tycho Brahe, for example, although relying on Copernican harmonies to explain astronomical data, proposed a system in which the earth was still the universe’s center. Essentially, it was a compromise between ancient cosmology and Copernican mathematical astronomy. However, Brahe recorded accurate and precise astronomical observations, which helped to compel others towards Copernicanism—particularly Johannes Kepler, who used its mathematical precision to solve the planetary motion problem. The final player Kuhn considered in the revolution was Galileo, who, Kuhn claimed, provided through telescopic observations not proof of but rather propaganda for Copernicanism. Although astronomers achieved consensus during the seventeenth century, Copernicanism still faced serious resistance from Christianity. The Copernican revolution was completed with the Newtonian universe, which not only had an impact on astronomy but also on other sciences and even non-sciences. For instance, Newton’s universe changed the nature of God to that of a clockmaker. For Kuhn, Newtonian’s impact on disciplines other than astronomy was an example of its fruitfulness. Scientific progress, concluded Kuhn, is not the linear process, as championed by traditional philosophers of science, in which scientific facts are stockpiled in a warehouse. Rather, it is the repeated destruction and replacement of scientific theories. The professional reviews of The Copernican Revolution signaled Kuhn’s acceptance into the philosophical and historical communities. His reconstruction of the revolution was considered for the most part scientifically accurate and methodologically appropriate. Reviewers considered integration of the science and the social an advance over other histories that ignored these dimensions of the historical narrative. Although philosophers appreciated the historical dimension of Kuhn’s study, they found its analysis imprecise according to their standards. Overall, both the historical and philosophical communities expressed no major objections to the image of science that animated Kuhn’s narrative. Kuhn’s reconstruction of the Copernican revolution portrayed a radically different image of science than that of traditional philosophers of science. Justification of scientific knowledge was not simply a logical or objective affair but also included non-logical or subjective factors. According to Kuhn, scientific progress is not a clear-sighted linear process aimed directly at the truth. Rather, there are contingencies that can divert and forestall the progress of science. Moreover, Copernicus’ revolution changed the way astronomers and non-astronomers viewed the world. This change in perceiving the world was the result of new sets of challenges, new techniques, and a new hermeneutics for interpreting data. Besides differing from traditional philosophers of science, Kuhn’s image of science put him at odds with Whig historians of science. These historians underrated ancient cosmologies by degrading them to myth or religious belief. Such a move was often a rhetorical ploy on the part of the victors to enhance the status of the current scientific theory. Only by showing how Aristotelian-Ptolemaic geocentric astronomy was authentic science could Kuhn argue for the radical transformation (revolution) that Copernican heliocentric astronomy invoked. Kuhn also asserted that Copernicus’ theory was not accepted simply for its predictive ability, since it was not as accurate as the original conceptual scheme, but because of non-empirical factors, such as the simplicity of Copernican’s system in which certain ad hoc modifications for accounting for the orbits of various planets were eliminated. In 1956, Harvard denied Kuhn tenure because the tenure committee felt his book on the Copernican revolution was too popular in its approach and analysis. A friend of Kuhn knew Steven Pepper, who was chair of the philosophy department at the University of California at Berkeley. Kuhn’s friend told Pepper that Kuhn was looking for an academic position. Pepper’s department was searching for someone to establish a program in the history and philosophy of science. Berkeley eventually offered Kuhn a position in the philosophy department and later asked if he also wanted an appointment in the history department. Kuhn accepted both positions and joined the Berkeley faculty as an assistant professor. Kuhn found Stanley Cavell in the philosophy department, a soulmate to replace Nash. Kuhn had meet Cavell earlier while they were both fellows at Harvard. Cavell was an ethicist and aesthetician, whom Kuhn found intellectually stimulating. He introduced Kuhn to Wittgenstein’s notion of language games. Besides Cavell, Kuhn developed a professional relationship with Paul Feyerabend, who was also working on the notion of incommensurability. In 1958, Berkeley promoted Kuhn to associate professor and granted him tenure. Moreover, having completed several historical projects, he was ready to return to the philosophical issues that first attracted him to the history of science. Beginning in the fall of 1958, he spent a year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, California. What struck Kuhn about the relationships among behavioral and social scientists was their inability to agree on the fundamental problems and practices of their discipline. Although natural scientists do not necessarily have the right answers to their questions, there is an agreement over fundamentals. This difference between natural and social scientists eventually led Kuhn to formulate the paradigm concept. c. The Last Mile to Structure Although The Copernican Revolution represented a significant advance in Kuhn’s articulation of a revolutionary theory of science, several issues still needed attention. What was missing from Kuhn’s reconstruction of the Copernican revolution was an understanding of how scientists function on a daily basis, when an impending revolution is not looming. That understanding emerged gradually during the last mile on the road to Structure in terms of three papers written from the mid-fifties to the early sixties. In the first paper, ‘The function of measurement in modern physical science’, Kuhn challenged the belief that if scientists cannot measure a phenomenon then their knowledge of it is inadequate or not scientific. Part of the reason for Kuhn’s concern over measurement in science was its textbook tradition, which he believed perpetuates a myth about measurement that is misleading. Kuhn compared the textbook presentation of measurement to a machine in which scientists feed laws and theories along with initial conditions into the machine’s hopper at the top, turn a handle on the side representing logical and mathematical operations, and then collect numerical predictions exiting the machine’s chute in the front. Scientists finally compare experimental observations to theoretical predictions. The function of these measurements serves as a test of the theory, which is the confirmation function of measurement. Kuhn claimed that the above function is not why measurements are reported in textbooks; rather, measurements are reported to give the reader an idea of what the professional community believes is reasonable agreement between theoretical predictions and experimental observations. Reasonable agreement, however, depends upon approximate, not exact, agreement between theory and data and differs from one science to the next. Moreover, external criteria do not exist for determining reasonableness. For Kuhn, the actual function of normal measurement in science is found in its journal articles. That function is neither invention of novel theories nor the confirmation of older ones. Discovery and exploratory measurements in science instead are rare. The reason is that changes in theories, which require discovery or confirmation, occur during revolutions, which are also quite rare. Once a revolution occurs, moreover, the new theory only exhibits potential for ordering and explaining natural phenomena. The function of normal measurement is to tighten reasonable agreement between novel theoretical predictions and experimental observations. The textbook tradition is also misleading in terms of normal measurement’s effects. It claims that theories must conform to quantitative facts. Such facts are not the given but the expected and the scientist’s task is to obtain them. This obligation to obtain the expected quantitative fact is often the incentive for developing novel technology. Moreover, a well-developed theoretical system is required for meaningful measurement in science. Besides the function of normal or expected measurement, Kuhn also examined the function of extraordinary measurement—which pertain to unexpected results. It is this latter type of measurement that exhibits the discovery and confirmatory functions. When normal scientific practice results consistently in unexpected anomalies, this leads to crisis, and extraordinary measurement often aids to resolve it. Crisis then leads to the invention of new theories. Again, extraordinary measurement plays a critical role in this process. Theory invention in response to quantitative anomalies leads to decisive measurements for judging a novel theory’s adequacy, whereas qualitative anomalies generally lead to ad hoc modifications of theories. Extraordinary measurement allows scientists to choose among competing theories. Kuhn was moving closer towards a notion of normal science through an analysis of normal measurement, in contrast to extraordinary measurement, in science. His conception of science continued to distance him from traditional philosophers of science. But, the notion of normal measurement was not as robust as he needed. Importantly, Kuhn was changing the agenda for philosophy of science from justification of scientific theories as finished products in textbooks to dynamic process by which theories are tested and assimilated into the professional literature. A robust notion of normal science was the revolutionary concept he needed, to overturn the traditional image of science as an accumulated body of facts. With the introduction of normal and extraordinary measurement, the step towards the notions of normal and extraordinary science in Kuhn’s revolutionary image of science was imminent. Kuhn worked out those notions in The Essential Tension. He began by addressing the notion that creative thinking in science assumes a particular assumption of science in which science advances through unbridled imagination and divergent thinking—which involves identifying multiple avenues by which to solve a problem and determining which one works best. Kuhn acknowledged that such thinking is responsible for some scientific progress, but he proposed that convergent thinking—which limits itself to well-defined, often logical, steps for solving a problem—is also an important means of progress. While revolutions, which depend on divergent thinking, are an obvious means for scientific progress, Kuhn insisted that few scientists consciously design revolutionary experiments. Rather, most scientists engage in normal research, which represents convergent thinking. But, occasionally scientists may break with the tradition of normal science and replace it with a new tradition. Science, as a profession, is both traditional and iconoclastic, and the tension between them often creates a space in which to practice it. Next, Kuhn utilized the term paradigm, while discussing the pedagogical advantages of convergent thinking—especially as displayed in science textbooks. Whereas textbooks in other disciplines include the methodological and conceptual conflicts prevalent within the discipline, science textbooks do not. Rather, science education is the transmission of a tradition that guides the activities of practitioners. In science education, students are taught not to evaluate the tradition but to accept it. Progress within normal research projects represents attempts to bring theory and observation into closer agreement and to extend a theory’s scope to new phenomena. Given the convergent and tradition-bound nature of science education and of scientific practice, how can normal research be a means for the generation of revolutionary knowledge and technology? According to Kuhn, a mature science provides the background that allows practitioners to identify non-trivial problems or anomalies with a paradigm. In other words, without mature science there can be no revolution. Kuhn continued to develop the notion of normal research and its convergent thinking in ‘The function of dogma in scientific research’. He began with the traditional image of science as an objective and critical enterprise. Although this is the ideal, the reality is that often scientists already know what to expect from their investigations of natural phenomena. If the expected is not forthcoming, then scientists must struggle to find conformity between what they expect and what they observe, which textbooks encode as dogmas. Dogmas are critical for the practice of normal science and for advancement in it because they define the puzzles for the profession and stipulate the criteria for their solution. Kuhn next expanded the range of paradigms to embrace scientific practice in general, rather than simply as a model for research. Specifically, paradigms include not only a community’s previous scientific achievements but also its theoretical concepts, the experimental techniques and protocols, and even the natural entities. In short, they are the community’s body of beliefs or foundations. Paradigms are also open-ended in terms of solving problems. Moreover, they are exclusive in their nature, in that there is only one paradigm per mature science. Finally, they are not permanent fixtures of the scientific landscape, for eventually paradigms are replaceable. Importantly, for Kuhn, when a paradigm replaces another the two paradigms are radically different. Having done paradigmatic spadework, Kuhn then discussed the notion of normal scientific research. The process of matching paradigm and nature includes extending and applying the paradigm to expected but also unexpected parts of nature. This does not necessarily mean discovering the unknown as it does explaining the known. Although the dogma paper is only a fragment of the solution to problems associated with the traditional image of science, the complete solution was soon to appear in Structure. 3. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions In July 1961, Kuhn completed a draft of Structure; and in 1962, it was published as the final monograph in the second volume of Neurath’s International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Charles Morris was instrumental in its publication and Carnap served as its editor. Structure was not a single publishing event in 1962; rather, it covered the years from 1962 to 1970. After its publication, Kuhn was engrossed for the rest of the sixties addressing criticisms directed to the ideas contained in it, especially the paradigm concept. During this time, he continued to develop and refine his new image of science. The endpoint was a second edition of Structure that appeared in 1970. The text of the revised edition, however, remained essentially unaltered and only a ‘Postscript—1969’ was added in which Kuhn addressed his critics. What Kuhn proposed in Structure was a new image of science. That image differed radically from the traditional one. The difference hinged on a shift from a logical analysis and an explanation of scientific knowledge as finished product to a historical narration and description of scientific practices by which a community of practitioners produces scientific knowledge. In short, it was a shift from the subject (the product) to the verb (to produce). According to the traditional image, science is a repository of accumulated facts, discovered by individuals at specific periods in history. One of the central tasks of traditional historians, given this image of science, was to answer questions about who discovered what and when. Even though the task seemed straightforward, many historians found it difficult and doubted whether these were the right kinds of questions to ask concerning science’s historical record. The historiographic revolution in the study of science changed the sorts of questions historians asked by revising the underlying assumptions concerning the approach to reading the historical record. Rather than reading history backwards and imposing current ideas and values on the past, texts are read within their historical context thereby maintaining their integrity. The historiographic revolution also had implications for how to analyze and understand science philosophically. The goal of Structure, declared Kuhn, was to cash out those implications. The structure of scientific development, according to Kuhn, may be illustrated schematically, as follows: pre-paradigm science → normal science → extraordinary science → new normal science. The step from pre-paradigm science to normal science involves consensus of the community around a single paradigm, where no prior consensus existed. This is the step required for transitioning from immature to mature science. The step from normal science to extraordinary science includes the community’s recognition that the reigning paradigm is unable to account for accumulating anomalies. A crisis ensues, and community practitioners engage in extraordinary science to resolve its anomalies. A scientific revolution occurs with crisis resolution. Once a community selects a new paradigm, it discards the old one and another period of new normal science follows. The revolution or paradigm shift is now complete, and the cycle from normal science to new normal science through revolution is free to occur again. For Kuhn, the origin of a scientific discipline begins with the identification of a natural phenomenon, which members of the discipline investigate experimentally and attempt to explain theoretically. But, each member of that nascent discipline is at cross-purposes with other members; for each member often represents a school working from different foundations. Scientists, operating under these conditions, share few, if any, theoretical concepts, experimental techniques, or phenomenal entities. Rather, each school is in competition for monetary and social resources and for the allegiance of the professional guild. An outcome of this lack of consensus is that all facts seem equally relevant to the problem(s) at hand and fact gathering itself is often a random activity. There is then a proliferation of facts and hence little progress in solving the problem(s) under these conditions. Kuhn called this state pre-paradigm or immature science, which is non-directed and flexible, providing a community of practitioners little guidance. To achieve the status of a science, a discipline must reach consensus with respect to a single paradigm. This is realized when, during the competition involved in pre-paradigm science, one school makes a stunning achievement that catches the professional community’s attention. The candidate paradigm elicits the community’s confidence that the problems are solvable with precision and in detail. The community’s confidence in a paradigm to guide research is the basis for the conversion of its members, who now commit to it. After paradigm consensus, Kuhn claimed that scientists are in the position to commence with the practice of normal science. The prerequisite of normal science then includes a commitment to a shared paradigm that defines the rules and standards by which to practice science. Whereas pre-paradigm science is non-directed and flexible, normal or paradigm science is highly directed and rigid. Because of its directedness and rigidity, normal scientists are able to make the progress they do. The paradigm concept loomed large in Kuhn’s new image of science. He defined the concept in terms of the community’s concrete achievements, such as Newtonian mechanics, which the professional can commonly recognize but cannot fully describe or explain. A paradigm is certainly not just a set of rules or algorithms by which scientists blindly practice their trade. In fact, there is no easy way to abstract a paradigm’s essence or to define its features exhaustively. Moreover, a paradigm defines a family resemblance, à la Wittgenstein, of problems and procedures for solving problems that are part of a single research tradition. Although scientists rely, at times, on rules to guide research, these rules do not precede paradigms. Importantly, Kuhn was not claiming that rules are unnecessary for guiding research but rather that they are not always sufficient, either pedagogically or professionally. Kuhn compared the paradigm concept to Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowledge, in which knowledge production depends on the investigator’s acquisition of skills that do not reduce to methodological rules and protocols. As noted above, Newtonian mechanics represents an example of a Kuhnian paradigm. The three laws of motion comprising it provided the scientific community with the resources to investigate natural phenomena in terms of both precision and predictability. In terms of precision, Newtonian mechanics allowed physicists to measure and explain accurately—with clockwork exactitude—the motion not only of celestial but also terrestrial bodies. With respect to prediction, physicists used the Newtonian paradigm to determine the potential movement of heavenly and earthly bodies. Thus, Newtonian mechanics qua paradigm equipped physicists with the ability to explain and manipulate natural phenomena. In sum, it became a way of viewing the world. According to Kuhn, a paradigm allows scientists to ignore concerns over a discipline’s fundamentals and to concentrate on solving its puzzles—as the Newtonian paradigm permitted physicists to do for several centuries. It not only guides scientists in terms of identifying soluble puzzles, but it also prevents scientists from tackling insoluble ones. Kuhn compared paradigms to maps that guide and direct the community’s investigations. Only when a paradigm guides the community’s activities is scientific advancement as cumulative progress possible. The activity of practitioners engaged in normal science is paradigm articulation and extension to new areas. Indeed, the Newtonian paradigm was adapted even for medicine. When a new paradigm is established, it solves only a few critical problems that faced the community. But, it does offer the promise for solving many more problems. Much of normal science involves mopping up, in which the community forces nature into a conceptually rigid framework—the paradigm. Rather than being dull and routine, however, such activity, according to Kuhn, is exciting and rewarding and requires practitioners who are creative and resourceful. Normal scientists are not out to make new discoveries or to invent new theories, outside the paradigm’s aegis. Rather, they are involved in using the paradigm to understand nature precisely and in detail. From the experimental end of this task, normal scientists go to great pains to increase the precision and reliability of their measurements and facts. They are also involved in closing the gap between observations and theoretical predictions, and they attempt to clarify ambiguities left over from the paradigm’s initial adoption. They also strive to extend the scope of the paradigm by including phenomena not heretofore investigated. Much of this activity requires exploratory investigation, in which normal scientists make novel discoveries but anticipated vis-à-vis the paradigm. To solve these experimental puzzles often requires considerable technological ingenuity and innovation on the part of the scientific community. As Kuhn notes, Atwood’s machine—developed almost a century after Newton, is a good illustration of this. Besides experimental puzzles, there are also the theoretical puzzles of normal science, which obviously mirror the types of experimental puzzles. Normal scientists conduct theoretical analyses to enhance the match between theoretical predictions and experimental observations, especially in terms of increasing the paradigm’s precision and scope. Again, just as experimental ingenuity is required so is theoretical ingenuity to explain natural phenomena successfully. Normal science, according to Kuhn, is puzzle-solving activity, and its practitioners are puzzle solvers and not paradigm testers. The paradigm’s power over a community of practitioners is that it can transform seemingly insoluble problems into soluble ones through the practitioner’s ingenuity and skill. Besides the assured solution, Kuhn’s paradigm concept also involved rules of the puzzle-solving game not in a narrow sense of algorithms but in a broad sense of viewpoints or preconceptions. Besides these rules of the game, as it were, there are also metaphysical commitments, which inform the community as to the types of natural entities, and methodological commitments, which inform the community as to kinds of laws and explanations. Although rules are often necessary for normal scientific research, they are not always required. Normal science can proceed in the absence of such rules. Although scientists engaged in normal science do not intentionally attempt to make unexpected discoveries, such discoveries do occur. Paradigms are imperfect and rifts in the match between paradigm and nature are inevitable. For Kuhn, discoveries not only occur in terms of new facts but there is also invention in terms of novel theories. Both discoveries of new facts and invention of novel theories begin with anomalies, which are violations of paradigm expectations during the practice of normal science. Anomalies can lead to unexpected discoveries. For Kuhn, unexpected discoveries involve complex processes that include the intertwining of both new facts and novel theories. Facts and theories go hand-in-hand, for such discoveries cannot be made by simple inspection. Because discoveries depend upon the intertwining of observations and theories, the discovery process takes time for the conceptual integration of the novel with the known. Moreover, that process is complicated by the fact that novelties are often resisted due to prior expectations. Because of allegiance to a paradigm, scientists are loathed to abandon it simply because of an anomaly or even several anomalies. In other words, anomalies are generally not counter-instances that falsify a paradigm. Just as anomalies are critical for discovery of new facts or phenomena, so they are essential for the invention of novel theories. Although facts and theories are intertwined, the emergence of novel theories is the outcome of a crisis. The crisis is the result of the paradigm’s breakdown or inability to provide solutions to its anomalies. The community then begins to harbor questions about the ability of the paradigm to guide research, which has a profound impact upon it. The chief characteristic of a crisis is the proliferation of theories. As members of a community in crisis attempt to resolve its anomalies, they offer more and varied theories. Interestingly, anomalies that are responsible for the crisis may not necessarily be new since they may have been present all along. This helps to explain why anomalies lead to a period of crisis in the first place. The paradigm promised resolution of them but was unable to fulfill its promise. The overall effect is a return to a situation very similar to pre-paradigm science. Closure of a crisis occurs in one of three possible ways, according to Kuhn. First, on occasion that the paradigm is sufficiently robust to resolve anomalies and to restore normal science practice. Second, even the most radical methods are unable to revolve the anomalies. Under these circumstances, the community tables them until future investigation and analysis. Third, the crisis is resolved with the replacement of the old paradigm by a new one but only after a period of extraordinary science. Kuhn stressed that the initial response of a community in crisis is not to abandon its paradigm. Rather, its members make every effort to salvage it through ad hoc modifications until the anomalies can be resolved, either theoretically or experimentally. The reason for this strong allegiance, claimed Kuhn, is that a community must first have an alternative candidate to take the original paradigm’s place. For science, at least normal science, is possible only with a paradigm, and to reject it without a substitute is to reject science itself, which reflects poorly on the community and not on the paradigm. Moreover, a community does not reject a paradigm simply because of a fissure in the paradigm-nature fit. Kuhn’s aim was to reject a naïve Popperian falsificationism in which single counter-instances are sufficient to reject a theory. In fact, he reversed the tables and contended that counter-instances are essential for the practice of vibrant normal science. Although the goal of normal science is not necessarily to generate counter-instances, normal science practice does provide the occasion for their possible occurrence. Normal science, then, serves as an opportunity for scientific revolutions. If there are no counter-instances, reasoned Kuhn, scientific development comes to a halt. The transition from normal science through crisis to extraordinary science involves two key events. First, the paradigm’s boundaries become blurred when faced with recalcitrant anomalies; and, second, its rules are relaxed leading to proliferation of theories and ultimately to the emergence of a new paradigm. Often relaxing the rules allows practitioners to see exactly where the problem is and how to solve it. This state has tremendous impact upon a community’s practitioners, similar to that during pre-paradigm science. Extraordinary scientists, according to Kuhn, behave erratically—because scientists are trained under a paradigm to be puzzle-solvers, not paradigm-testers. In other words, they are not trained to do extraordinary science and must learn as they go. For Kuhn, this type of behavior is more open to psychological than logical analysis. Moreover, during periods of extraordinary science practitioners may even examine the discipline’s philosophical foundations. To that end, they analyze their assumptions in order to loosen the old paradigm’s grip on the community and to suggest alternative approaches to the generation of a new paradigm. Although the process of extraordinary science is convoluted and complex, a replacement paradigm may emerge suddenly. Often the source of its inspiration is rooted in the practice of extraordinary science itself, in terms of the interconnections among various anomalies. Finally, whereas normal science is a cumulative process, adding one paradigm achievement to the next, extraordinary science is not; rather, it is like—using Herbert Butterfield’s analogy—grabbing hold of a stick’s other end. That other end of the stick is a scientific revolution. The transition from extraordinary science to a new normal science represents a scientific revolution. According to Kuhn, a scientific revolution is non-cumulative in which a newer paradigm replaces an older one—either partially or completely. It can come in two sizes: a major revolution such as the shift from geocentric universe to heliocentric universe or a minor revolution such as the discovery of X-rays or oxygen. But whether big or small, all revolutions have the same structure: generation of a crisis through irresolvable anomalies and establishment of a new paradigm that resolves the crisis-producing anomalies. Because of the extreme positions taken by participants in a revolution, opposing camps often become galvanized in their positions, and communication between them breaks down and discourse fails. The ultimate source for the establishment of a new paradigm during a crisis is community consensus, that is, when enough community members are convinced by persuasion and not simply by empirical evidence or logical analysis. Moreover, to accept the new paradigm, community practitioners must be assured that there is no chance for the old paradigm to solve its anomalies. Persuasion loomed large in Kuhn’s scientific revolutions because the new paradigm solves the anomalies the old paradigm could not. Thus, the two paradigms are radically different from each other, often with little overlap between them. For Kuhn, a community can only accept the new paradigm if it considers the old one wrong. The radical difference between old and new paradigms, such that the old cannot be derived from the new, is the basis of the incommensurability thesis. In essence, there is no common measure or standard for the two paradigms. This is evident, claimed Kuhn, when looking at the meaning of theoretical terms. Although the terms from an older paradigm can be compared to those of a newer one, the older terms must be transformed with respect to the newer ones. But, there is a serious problem with restating the old paradigm in transformed terms. The older, transformed paradigm may have some utility, for example pedagogically, but a community cannot use it to guide its research. Like a fossil, it reminds the community of its history but it can no longer direct its future. The establishment of a new paradigm resolves a scientific revolution and issues forth a new period of normal science. With its establishment, Kuhn’s new image of a mature science comes full circle. Only after a period on intense competition among rival paradigms, does the community choose a new paradigm and scientists once again become puzzle-solvers rather than paradigm-testers. The resolution of a scientific revolution is not a straightforward process that depends only upon reason or evidence. Part of the problem is that proponents of competing paradigms cannot agree on the relevant evidence or proof or even on the relevant anomalies that require resolution, since their paradigms are incommensurable. Another factor that leads to difficulties in resolving scientific revolutions is that communication among members in crisis is only partial. This results from the new paradigm borrowing from the old paradigm theoretical terms and concepts, and laboratory protocols. Although they share borrowed vocabulary and technology, the new paradigm gives new meaning and uses to them. The net result is that members of competing paradigms talk past one another. Moreover, the change in paradigms is not a gradual process in which different parts of the paradigm are changed piecemeal; rather, the change must be as a whole and suddenly. Convincing scientists to make such a wholesale transformation takes time. How then does one segment of the community convince or persuade another to switch paradigms? For members who worked for decades under the old paradigm, they may never accept the new paradigm. Rather, it is often the younger members who accept the new paradigm through something like a religious conversion. According to Kuhn, faith is the basis for conversion, especially faith in the potential of the new paradigm to solve future puzzles. By invoking the terms conversion and faith, Kuhn was not implying that arguments and reason are unimportant in a paradigm shift. Indeed, the most common reason for accepting a new paradigm is that it solves the anomalies the old paradigm could not. However, Kuhn point was that argument and reason alone are insufficient. Aesthetic or subjective factors also play an important role in a paradigm shift, since the new paradigm solves only a few, but critical, anomalies. These factors weigh heavily in the shift initially by reassuring community members that the new paradigm represents the discipline’s future. From the resolution of revolutions, Kuhn made several important philosophical points concerning the principles of verification and falsification. As Kuhn acknowledged, philosophers no longer search for absolute verification, since no theory can be tested exhaustively; rather, they calculate the probability of a theory’s verification. According to probabilistic verification, every imaginable theory must be compared with one another vis-à-vis the available data. The problem in terms of Kuhn’s new image of science is that a theory is tested with respect to a given paradigm, and such a restriction precludes access to every imaginable theory. Moreover, Kuhn rejected falsifying instances because no paradigm resolves every problem facing a community. Under these conditions, no paradigm would ever be accepted. For Kuhn, the process of verification and falsification must include imprecision associated with theory-fact fit. An interesting feature of scientific revolutions, according to Kuhn, is their invisibility. What he meant by this is that in the process of writing textbooks, popular scientific essays, and even philosophy of science, the path to the current paradigm is sanitized to make it appear as if it was in some sense born mature. Disguising a paradigm’s history is an outcome of a belief about scientific knowledge, which considers it as invariable and its accumulation as linear. This disguising serves the winner of the crisis by establishing its authority, especially as a pedagogical aid for indoctrinating students into a community of practitioners. Another important effect of a revolution, related to a paradigm shift, is a shift in the community’s image of science. The change in science’s image should be no surprise, since the prevailing paradigm defines science. Change that paradigm and science itself changes, at least how to practice it. In other words, the shift in science’s image is a result of a change in the community’s standards for what constitutes its puzzles and its puzzles’ solutions. Finally, revolutions transform scientists from practitioners of normal science, who are puzzle-solvers, to practitioners of extraordinary science, who are paradigm-testers. Besides transforming science, revolutions also transform the world that scientists inhabit and investigate. One of the major impacts of a scientific revolution is a change of the world in which scientists practice their trade. Kuhn’s world-changes thesis, as it has become known, is certainly one of his most radical and controversial ideas, besides the associated incommensurability thesis. The issue is how far ontologically does the change go, or is it simply an epistemological ploy to reinforce the comprehensive effects of scientific revolutions. In other words, does the world really change or simply the worldview, that is, one’s perspective on or perception of the world? For Kuhn, the answer relied not on a logical or even a philosophical but rather a psychological analysis of the change. Kuhn analyzed the changes in worldview by analogizing it to a gestalt switch, for example, duck-rabbit. Although the gestalt analogy is suggestive, it is limited to only perceptual changes and says little about the role of previous experience in such transformations. Previous experience is important because it influences what a scientist sees when making an observation. Moreover, with a gestalt switch, the person can stand above or outside of it acknowledging with certainty that one sees now a duck or now a rabbit. Such an independent perspective, which eventually is an authoritarian stance, is not available to the community of practitioners; there is no answer sheet, as it were. Because the community’s access to the world is limited by what it can observe, any change in what is observed has important consequences for the nature of what is observed, that is, the change has ontological significance. Thus, for Kuhn, the change revolution brings about is more than simply seeing or observing a different world; it also involves working in a different world. The perceptual transformation is more than reinterpretation of data. For, data are not stable but they too change during a paradigm shift. Data interpretation is a function of normal science, while data transformation is a function of extraordinary science. That transformation is often a result of intuitions. Moreover, besides a change in data, revolutions change the relationships among data. Although traditional western philosophy has searched for three centuries for stable theory-neutral data or observations to justify theories, that search has been in vain. Sensory experience occurs through a paradigm of some sort, argued Kuhn, even articulations of that experience. Hence, no one can step outside a paradigm to make an observation; it is simply impossible given the limits of human physiology. Kuhn then took on the nature of scientific progress. For normal science, progress is cumulative in that the solutions to puzzles form a repository of information and knowledge about the world. This progress is the result of the direction a paradigm provides a community of practitioners. Importantly, the progress achieved through normal science, in terms of the information and knowledge, is used to educate the next generation of scientists and to manipulate the world for human welfare. Scientific revolutions change all that. For Kuhn, revolutionary progress is not cumulative but non-cumulative. What, then, does a community of practitioners gain by going through a revolution or paradigm shift? Has it made any kind of progress in its rejection of a previous paradigm and the fruit that paradigm yielded? Of course, the victors of the revolution are going to claim that progress was made after the revolution. To do otherwise would be to admit that they were wrong. Rather advocates of the new normal science are going to do everything they can to ensure that their winning paradigm is seen as pushing forward a better understanding of the world. The progress achieved through a revolution is two-fold, according to Kuhn. The first is the successful solution of anomalies that a previous paradigm could not solve. The second is the promise to solve additional problems or puzzles that arise from these anomalies. But has the community gotten closer to the truth, that is, the notion of verisimilitude, by going through a revolution? According to Kuhn the answer is no. For Kuhn, progress in science is not directed activity towards some goal like truth. Rather, scientific progress is evolutionary. Just as natural selection operates during biological evolution in the emergence of a new species, so community selection during a scientific revolution functions similarly in the emergence of a new theory. And, just as species are adapted to their environments, so theories are adapted to the world. Kuhn had no answer to the question why this should be other than the world and the community that investigates it exhibit unique features. What these features are, Kuhn did not know, but he concluded that the new image of science he had proposed would resolve, like a new paradigm after a scientific revolution, these problems. He invited the next generation of philosophers of science to join him in a new philosophy of science incommensurate with its predecessor. The reaction to Kuhn’s Structure was at first congenial, especially by historians of science, but within a few years it turned critical, particularly by philosophers. Critics charged him with irrationalism and epistemic relativism. Although he felt the reviews of Structure were good, his chief concerns were the tags of irrationalism and relativism—at least a pernicious kind of relativism. Kuhn believed the charges were inaccurate, however, simply because he maintained that science does not progress toward a predetermined goal. But, like evolutionary change, one theory replaces another with a better fit between theory and nature vis-à-vis competitors. Moreover, he believed that use of the Darwinian evolution was the correct framework for discussing science’s progress. But, he felt no one took it seriously. On 13 July 1965, Kuhn participated in an International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, held at Bedford College in London. The colloquium was organized jointly by the British Society for the Philosophy of Science and by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Kuhn delivered the initial paper comparing his and Karl Popper’s conceptions of the growth of scientific knowledge. John Watkins then delivered a paper criticizing Kuhn’s notion of normal science, with Popper chairing the session. Popper also presented a paper criticizing Kuhn, as did several other members of the philosophy of science community, including Stephen Toulmin, L. Pearce Williams, and Margaret Masterman, who identified twenty-one senses of Kuhn’s use of paradigm in Structure. Masterman concluded her paper inviting others to join in clarifying Kuhn’s paradigm concept. Kuhn himself took up Masterman’s challenge and clarified the paradigm concept in the second edition of Structure, particularly in its ‘Postscript—1969’. To that end, he divided paradigm into disciplinary matrix and exemplars. The former represents the milieu of the professional practice, consisting of symbolic generalizations, models, and values, while the latter represents solutions to concrete problems that a community accepts as paradigmatic. In other words, exemplars serve as templates for solving problems or puzzles facing the scientific community and thereby for advancing the community’s scientific knowledge. For Kuhn, scientific knowledge is not localized simply within theories and rules; rather, it is localized within exemplars. The basis for an exemplar to function in puzzle solving is the scientist’s ability to see the similarity between a previously solved puzzle and a currently unsolved one. In the early sixties, van Vleck invited Kuhn to direct a project collecting materials on the history of quantum mechanics. In August 1960, Hunter Dupree, Charles Kittel, Kuhn, John Wheeler, and Harry Wolff, met in Berkeley to discuss the project’s organization. Wheeler next met with Richard Shryock and a joint committee of the American Physical Society and the American Philosophical Society on the History of Theoretical Physics in the Twentieth Century was formed to sponsor and develop the project. The project lasted for three years, with the first and last years of the project conducted in Berkeley and the middle year in Europe. The National Science Foundation funded the project. The project led to a publication, by John Heilbron and Kuhn, on the origins of the Bohr atom. They provided a revisionist narrative of Bohr’s path to the quantized atom, beginning with his 1911 doctoral dissertation and concluding with his 1913 three-part paper on atomic structure. The intrigue of this historical study was that within a six-week period in mid-1912 Bohr went from little interest in models of the atom to producing a quantized model of J.J. Rutherford’s atom and applying that model to several perplexing problems. The authors explored Bohr’s sudden interest in atomic models. They proposed that his interest stemmed from specific problems, which guided Bohr in terms of both his reading and research toward the potential of the atomic structure for solving them. The solutions to those problems resulted from what Heilbron and Kuhn called a 1913 February transformation in Bohr’s research. What initiated the transformation, claimed the authors, was that Bohr had read a few months earlier J.W. Nicholson’s papers on the application of Max Planck’s constant to generate an atomic model. Although Nicholson’s model was incorrect, it led Bohr in the right direction. Then in February 1913, Bohr, in a conversation with H.R. Hansen, obtained the last piece of the puzzle. After the transformation, Bohr completed the atomic model project within the year. Besides completing a draft of Structure in 1961, Kuhn was made full professor at Berkeley, but only in the history department. Members of philosophy department voted to deny him promotion in their department, a denial that angered and hurt Kuhn tremendously. Princeton University made Kuhn an offer to join its faculty, while he was in Europe. The university had recently inaugurated a history and philosophy of science program. The program’s chair was Charles Gillispie and its staff included John Murdoch, Hilary Putnam, and Carl Hempel. Upon returning to the United States in 1963, Kuhn visited Princeton. He decided to accept the offer and joined its faculty in 1964. He became the program’s director in 1967 and the following year Princeton appointed him the Moses Taylor Pyne Professor of History. As the sixties ended, Structure was becoming increasingly popular, especially among student radicals who believed it liberated them from the tyranny of tradition. 4. The Road after Structure In 1979, Kuhn moved to M.I.T.’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. In 1983, he was appointed the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy. At M.I.T., he took a linguistic turn in his thinking, reflecting his new environment, which had a major impact on his subsequent work, especially on the incommensurability thesis. Structure’s success not only established the historiographic revolution in the study of science in either historically or philosophically or what came to be called the discipline of history and philosophy of science, but also supported the rise of science studies in general and specifically the sociology and anthropology of science, particularly the sociology of scientific knowledge. Kuhn rejected both these trajectories often attributed to Structure, for what he called historical philosophy of science. He conducted—as he categorized his work in the Essential Tension—either historical studies on science or their historiographic implications, or either metahistorical studies or their philosophical implications. In other words, his scholarly work was either historical or philosophical. a. Historical and Historiographic Studies Kuhn’s final major historical study was on Planck’s black-body radiation theory and the origins of quantum discontinuity. The transition from classical physics—in which particles pass through intermediate energy stages—to quantum physics—in which energy change is discontinuous—is traditionally attributed to Planck’s 1900 and 1901 quantum papers. According to Kuhn, this traditional account was inaccurate and the transition was initiated by Albert Einstein’s and Paul Ehrenfest’s independent 1906 quantum papers. Kuhn’s realization of this inaccuracy was similar to the enlightenment he experienced when struggling to make sense of Aristotle’s notion of mechanical motion. His initial epiphany occurred while reading Planck’s 1895 paper on black-body radiation. Through that experience, he realized that Planck’s 1900 and 1901 quantum papers were not the initiation of a new theory of quantum discontinuity, but rather they represented Planck’s effort to derive the black-body distribution law based on classical statistical mechanics. Kuhn concluded the study with an analysis of Planck’s second black-body theory, first published in 1911, in which Planck used the notion of discontinuity to derive the second theory. Rather than the traditional position, which claimed the second theory represents a regression on Planck’s part to classical physics, Kuhn argued that it represents the first time Planck incorporated into his theoretical work a theory in which he was not completely confident. In the black-body radiation and quantum discontinuity historical study, Kuhn did not use paradigm, normal science, anomaly, crisis, or incommensurability, which he championed in Structure. Critics, especially within the history and philosophy of science discipline, were disappointed. Kuhn bemoaned the book’s reception, even by its supporters. However, he later explored the historiographic and philosophical issues raised in Black-Body Theory with respect to Structure. The historiographic issues that the former book addressed were the same raised in the 1962 monograph. Specifically, he claimed that current historiography should attempt to understand previous scientific texts in terms of their contemporary context and not in terms of modern science. Kuhn’s concern was more than historical accuracy; rather, he was interested in recapturing the thought processes that lead to a change in theory. Although Structure was Kuhn’s articulation of this process for scientific change, the terminology in the monograph did not represent a straightjacket for narrating history. For Kuhn, the terminology and vocabulary, like paradigm and normal science, used in Structure were not products, such as metaphysical categories, to which a historical narrative must conform; rather, they had a different metaphysical function—as presuppositions towards an historical narrative as process. In other words, Structure’s terminology and vocabulary were tools by which to reconstruct a scientific historical narrative and not a template for articulating it. The purpose of history of science, according to Kuhn, was not just getting the facts straight but providing philosophers of science with an accurate image of science to practice their trade. Kuhn fervently believed that the new historiography of science would prevent philosophers from engaging in the excesses and distortions prevalent within traditional philosophy of science. He envisioned history of science informing philosophy of science as historical philosophy of science rather than history and philosophy of science, since the relationship was asymmetrical. Prior to 1950, history of science was a discipline practiced mostly by eminent scientists, who generally wrote heroic biographies or sweeping overviews of a discipline often for pedagogical purposes. Within the past generation, historians of science, such as Alexander Koyré, Anneliese Maier, and E.J. Dijsterhuis, developed an approach to the history of science that was simply more than chronicling science’s theoretical and technical achievements. An important factor in that development was the recognition of institutional and sociological factors in the practice of science. A consequence of this historiographic revolution was the distinction between internal and external histories of science. Internal history of science is concerned with the development of the theories and methods employed by scientists. In other words, it studies the history of events, people, and ideas internal to scientific advancement. The historian as internalist attempts to climb inside the mind of scientists as they push forward the boundaries of their discipline. External history of science concentrates on the social and cultural factors that impinge on the practice of science. For Kuhn, the distinction between internal and external histories of science mapped onto his pattern of scientific development. External or cultural and social factors are important during a scientific discipline’s initial establishment; however, once established, those factors no longer have a major impact on a community’s practice or its generation of scientific knowledge. They can have a minor impact on a mature science’s practice, such as the timing of technological innovation. Importantly for Kuhn, internal and external approaches to the history of science are not necessarily mutually exclusive but complementary. b. Metahistorical Studies As mentioned already, Kuhn considered himself a practitioner of both the history of science and the philosophy of science and not the history and philosophy of science, for a very practical reason. Crassly put, the goal for history is the particular while for philosophy the universal. Kuhn compared the differences between the two disciplines to a duck-rabbit Gestalt switch. In other words, the two disciplines are so fundamentally different in terms of their goals, that the resulting images of science are incommensurable. Moreover, to see the other discipline’s image requires a conversion. For Kuhn, then, the history of science and the philosophy of science cannot be practiced at the same time but only alternatively, and then with difficulty. How then can the history of science be of use to philosophers of science? The answer for Kuhn was by providing an accurate image of science. Rejecting the covering law model for historical explanation because it reduces historians to mere social scientists, Kuhn advocated an image based on ordering of historical facts into a narrative analogous to the one he proposed for puzzle solving under the aegis of a paradigm in the physical sciences. Historians of science, as they narrate change in science, provide an image of science that reflects the process by which scientific information develops, rather than the image provided by traditional philosophers of science in which scientific knowledge is simply a product of logical verification or falsification. Kuhn insisted that the history of science and the philosophy of science remain distinct disciplines, so that historians of science can provide an image of science to correct the distortion produced by traditional philosophers of science. According to Kuhn, the social history of science also distorts the image of science. For social historians, scientists construct rather than discover scientific knowledge. Although Kuhn was sympathetic to this type of history, he believed it created a gap between older constructions and the ones replacing them, which he challenged historians of science to fill. Besides social historians of science, Kuhn also accused sociologists of science for distorting the image of science. Although Kuhn acknowledged that factors such as interests, power, authority, among others, are important in the production of scientific knowledge, the predominant use of them by sociologists eclipses other factors such as nature itself. The key to rectifying the distortion introduced by sociologists is to shift from a rationality of belief, that is, the reasons scientists hold specific beliefs, to a rationality of change in beliefs, that is, the reasons scientists change their beliefs. For Kuhn, a historical philosophy of science was the means for correcting these distortions of the scientific image. Kuhn’s historical philosophy of science focused on the metahistorical issues derived from historical research, particularly scientific development and the related issues of theory choice and incommensurability. Importantly for Kuhn, both theory choice and incommensurability are intimately linked to one another. The former cannot be reduced to an algorithm of objective rules but requires subjective values because of the latter. Kuhn explored scientific development using three different approaches. The first was in terms of problem versus puzzle solving. According to Kuhn, problems have no ready solution; and, problem solving is often generally pragmatic and is the hallmark of an underdeveloped or immature science. Puzzles, on the other hand, occupy the attention of scientists involved in a developed or mature science. Although they have guaranteed solutions, the methods for solving puzzles are not assured. Scientists, who solve them, demonstrate their ingenuity and are rewarded by the community. With this distinction in mind, Kuhn envisioned scientific development as the transition of a scientific discipline from an underdeveloped problem-solving state to a developed puzzle-solving one. The question then arises as to how this occurs. The answer that many took from Structure was, adopt a paradigm. However, Kuhn found this answer to be incorrect in that paradigms are not unique only to the sciences. But does articulating the question in terms of puzzle-solving help? Kuhn’s answer was pragmatic, that is, keep trying different solutions until one works. In other words, philosophers of science had no exemplars by which to solve their problems. Kuhn’s second approach to scientific development was in terms of the growth of knowledge. He proposed an alternative view to the traditional one that scientific knowledge grows by a piecemeal accumulation of facts. To shed light on the alternative view, Kuhn offered a different reconstruction of science. The central ideas of a science cohere with one another, forming a set of the central ideas or core of a particular science. Besides the core, a periphery exists, which represents an area where scientists can investigate problems associated with a research tradition without changing core ideas. Kuhn then drew parallels between the current reconstruction of science and the earlier one in Structure. Obviously, the transition in cores from one research tradition to another is a scientific revolution. Moreover, the core represents a paradigm that defines a particular research tradition. Finally, the periphery is identified with normal science. The core then provides the means by which to practice science, and to change the core requires significant retooling that practitioners naturally resist. Is this change in the core a growth of knowledge? To answer the question, Kuhn examined the standard account of knowledge as justified true belief. What he found problematic with the account is the amount or nature of the evidence needed to justify a belief. And this, of course, raises the issue of truth for which he had no ready solution. Ultimately, Kuhn equivocated on the question of the growth of knowledge. Kuhn’s final approach to scientific development was through the analysis of three scientific revolutions: the shift from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics, Volta’s discovery of the electric cell, and Planck’s black-body radiation research and quantum discontinuity. From these examples, Kuhn derived three characteristics of scientific revolutions. The first was holistic in that scientific revolutions are all-or-none events. The second was the way referents change after revolutions, especially in terms of taxonomic categories. According to Kuhn, revolutions redistribute objects among these categories. The final characteristic of scientific revolutions was a change in a discipline’s analogy, metaphor, or model, which represents the connection between taxonomic categories and the world’s structure. According to traditional philosophers of science, the objective features of a good scientific theory include accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fecundity. However, these features, when used individually as criteria for theory choice, argued Kuhn, are imprecise and often conflict with one another. Although necessary for theory choice, they are insufficient and must include the characteristics of the scientists making the choices. These characteristics involve personal experiences or biography and personality or psychological traits. In other words, not only does theory choice rely on a theory’s objective features but also on individual scientists’ subjective characteristics. Why have traditional philosophers of science ignored or neglected subjective factors in theory choice? Part of the answer is that they confined the subjective to the context of discovery, while restricting the objective to the context of justification. Kuhn insisted that this distinction does not fit with observations of scientific practice. It is artificial, reflecting science pedagogy. But, actual scientific practice reveals that textbook presentations of theory choice are stylized, to convince students who rely on the authority of their instructors. What else can students do? Textbook science discloses only the product of science, not its process. For Kuhn, since subjective factors are present at the discovery phase of science, they should also be present at the justification phase. According to Kuhn, objective criteria function as values, which do not dictate theory choice but rather influence it. Values help to explain scientists’ behavior, which for the traditional philosopher of science may at times appear irrational. Most importantly, values account for disagreement over theories and help to distribute risk during debates over theories. Kuhn’s position had important consequences for the philosophy of science. He maintained that critics misinterpreted his position on theory choice as subjective. For them, the term denoted a matter of taste that is not rationally discussable. But, his use of the term did involve the discussable with respect to standards. Moreover, Kuhn denied that facts are theory independent and that there is strictly a rational choice to be made. Rather, he contended scientists do not choose a theory based on objective criteria alone but are converted based on subjective values. Finally, Kuhn discussed theory choice with respect to the incommensurability thesis. The question he entertained was what type of communication is possible among community members holding competing theories. The answer, according to Kuhn, is that communication is partial. The answer raised a second, and more important, question for Kuhn and his critics. Is good reason vis-à-vis empirical evidence available to justify theory choice, given such partial communication? The answer would be straightforward if communication was complete, but it is not. For Kuhn, this situation meant that ultimately reasonable evaluation of the empirical evidence is not compelling for theory choice and, of course, raised the charge of irrationality, which he denied. Kuhn identified two common misconceptions of his version of the incommensurability thesis. The first was that since two incommensurable theories cannot be stated in a common language, then they be cannot compared to one another in order to choose between them. The second was that since an older theory cannot be translated into modern expression, it cannot be articulated meaningfully. Kuhn addressed the first misconception by distinguishing between incommensurability as no common measure and as no common language. He defined the incommensurability thesis in terms of the latter rather than the former. Most theoretical terms are homophonic and can have the same meaning in two competing theories. However, only a handful of terms are incommensurable or untranslatable. Kuhn considered this a modest version of the incommensurability thesis, calling it local incommensurability, and claimed that it was his originally intention. Although there may be no common language to compare terms that change their meaning during a scientific revolution, there is a partially common language composed of the invariant terms that do permit some semblance of comparison. Thus, Kuhn argued, the first criticism fails; because, and this was his main point, an incommensurate residue remains even with a partially common language. As for the second misconception, Kuhn claimed that critics conflate the difference between translation and interpretation. The conflation is understandable since translation often involves interpretation. Translation for Kuhn is the process by which words or phrases of one language substitute for another. Interpretation, however, involves attempts to make sense of a statement or to make it intelligible. Incommensurability, then, does not mean that a theoretical term cannot be interpreted, that is, cannot be made intelligible; rather, it means that the term cannot be translated, that is, there is no equivalent for the term in the competing theoretical language. In other words, in order for the theoretical term to have meaning the scientist must go native in its use. Kuhn introduced the notion of the lexicon and its attendant taxonomy to capture both a term’s reference and intention or sense. In the lexicon, there are referring terms that are interrelated to other referring terms, that is, the holistic principle. The lexicon’s structure of interrelated terms resembles the world’s structure in terms of its taxonomic categories. A particular scientific community uses its lexicon to describe and explain the world in terms of this taxonomy. And, members of a community or of different communities must share the same lexicon if they are to communicate fully with one another. Moreover, claimed Kuhn, if full translation is to be achieved the two languages must share a similar structure with respect to their respective lexicons. Incommensurability, then, reflects lexicons that have different taxonomic structures by which the world is carved up and articulated. Kuhn also addressed a problem that involves communication among communities who hold incommensurable theories, or who occupy positions across a historical divide. Kuhn noted that although lexicons can change dramatically, this does not deter members from reconstructing their past in the current lexicon’s vocabulary. Such reconstruction obviously plays an important function in the community. But the issue is that, given the incommensurable nature of theories, assessments of true and false or right and wrong are unwarranted, for which critics charged Kuhn with a relativist position—a position he was less inclined to deny. The charge stemmed from the fact that Kuhn advocated no privileged position from which to evaluate a theory. Rather, evaluations must be made within the context of a particular lexicon. And thus, evaluations are relative to the relevant lexicon. But, Kuhn found the charge of relativism trivial. He acknowledged that his position on the relativity of truth and objectivity, with respect to the community’s lexicon, left him no option but to take literally world changes associated with lexical changes. But, is this an idealist position? Kuhn admitted that it appears to be, but he claimed that it is an idealism like none other. On the one hand, the world is composed of the community’s lexicon, but one the other hand, preconceived ideas cannot mold it. c. Evolutionary Philosophy of Science From the mid-1980s to early-1990s, Kuhn transitioned from historical philosophy of science and the paradigm concept to an evolutionary philosophy of science and the lexicon notion. To that end, he identified an alternative role for the incommensurability thesis with respect to segregating or isolating lexicons and their associated worlds from one another. Incommensurability now functioned for Kuhn as a mechanism to isolate a community’s lexicon from another’s and as a means to underpin a notion of scientific progress as the proliferation of scientific specialties. In other words, as the taxonomical structure of the two lexicons become isolated and thereby incommensurable with one another, according to Kuhn, a new specialty and its lexicon split off from the old or parent specialty and its lexicon. This process accounts for a notion of scientific progress as an increase in the number of scientific specialties after a revolution. Scientific progress, then, is akin to biological speciation, argued Kuhn, with incommensurability serving as the isolation mechanism. The result is a tree-like structure with increased specialization at the tips of the branches. Finally, Kuhn’s evolutionary philosophy of science is non-teleological in the sense that science progresses not towards an ultimate truth about the world but simply away from a lexicon that cannot be used to solve its anomalies to one that can. However, he still articulated incommensurability in terms of no common language, with its attendant problems involving the notion of meaning, and did not transform it fully with respect to an evolutionary philosophy of science. Kuhn was working out an evolutionary philosophy of science in a proposed book, Words and Worlds: An Evolutionary View of Scientific Development. He divided it into three parts, with three chapters in each. In the first part, Kuhn framed the problem associated with the incommensurability thesis and addressed the difficulties accessing past scientific achievements. In the first chapter, he presented an evolutionary view of scientific development. Without an Archimedean platform to guide theory assessment, Kuhn proposed a comparative method for assessing theoretical changes. The method forbids assessment of theories in isolation and methodological solecism. In the next chapter, he discussed the problems associated with examining past historical studies in science. Based on several historical cases, he claimed that anomalies in older scientific texts could be understood only through an interpretative process involving an ethnographic or a hermeneutical reading. He had now laid the groundwork for examining the incommensurability thesis. In the third chapter, Kuhn discussed the changes of word-meanings as changes in a taxonomy embedded in a lexicon—an apparatus of a language’s referring terms. The result of these changes was an untranslatable gap between two incommensurable theories. Finally, the lexical terms referring to objects change as the number of scientific specialties proliferate. In the book’s second part, Kuhn continued to explore the nature of a community’s lexicon, which he explicated in terms of taxonomic categories. These categories are grouped as contrast sets and no overlap of categories exists within the same contrast set, which Kuhn called the no-overlap principle. The principle prohibits the reference of terms to objects unless related to one another as species to genus. Moreover, the properties of the categories are reflected in the properties of their names. A term’s meaning then is a function of its taxonomic category. And, this restriction is the origin of untranslatability. In the first chapter of this part, Kuhn discussed the nature of substances in terms of sortal predicates. This move allowed Kuhn to introduce plasticity into the lexicon’s usage. Moreover, the differentiating set is not strictly conventional but relies on the world to which the different sets connect. In the next chapter, Kuhn extended the lexicon notion to artifacts, abstractions, and theoretical entities. In the final chapter of the second part, Kuhn specified the means by which community members acquire a lexicon. First, they must already possess a vocabulary about physical entities and forces. Next, definitions play little, if any, role in learning new terms; rather, those terms are acquired through ostensive examples, especially through problem solving and laboratory demonstrations. Third, a single example is inadequate to learn the meaning of a term; rather, multiple examples are required. Next, acquisition of a new term within a statement also requires acquisition of other new terms within that statement. And lastly, students can acquire the terms of a lexicon through different pedagogical routes. In the book’s concluding part, Kuhn discussed what occurs during a change in the lexicon and the implications for scientific development. In chapter seven, he examined the means by which lexicons change and the repercussions such change has for communication among communities with different lexicons. Moreover, he explored the role of arguments in lexical change. In the subsequent chapter, Kuhn identified the type of progress achieved with changes in lexicons. He maintained that progress is not the type that aims at a specific goal but rather is instrumental. In the final chapter, he broached the issues of relativism and realism not in traditional terms of truth and objectivity but rather with respect to the capability of making a statement. Statements from incommensurable theories that cannot be translated are ultimately ineffable. They can be neither true nor false but their capability of being stated is relative to the community’s history. In sum, the book’s aim was certainly to address the philosophical issues left over from Structure, but more importantly, it was to resolve the problems generated by a historical philosophy of science. Although others were also responsible for its creation, Kuhn assumed responsibility for resolving the problems; and the sine qua non for resolving them was the incommensurability thesis. For Kuhn, the thesis was required more than ever to defend rationality from the post-modern development of the strong program. 5. Conclusion In May 1990, a conference—or as Hempel called it, a Kuhnfest—was held in Kuhn’s honor at MIT, sponsored by the Sloan Foundation and organized by Paul Horwich and Judith Thomson. The conference speakers included Jed Buchwald, Nancy Cartwright, John Earman, Michael Friedman, Ian Hacking, John Heilbron, Ernan McMullin, N.M Swerdlow, and Norton Wise. The papers reflected Kuhn’s impact on the history and the philosophy of science. Hempel made a special appearance on the last day, followed by Kuhn’s remarks on the conference papers. As he approached the podium after Hempel’s remarks, before a standing-room-only audience, Kuhn was visibly moved by the outpouring of professional appreciation for his contributions, to a discipline that he cherished and from its members whom he truly respected. Kuhn retired from teaching in 1991 and became an emeritus professor at MIT. During Kuhn’s career, he received numerous awards and accolades. He was the recipient of honorary degrees from around a dozen academic institutions, such as University of Chicago, Columbia University, University of Padua, and University of Notre Dame. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Science—the most prestigious society for U.S. scientists—and was an honorary life member of the New York Academy of Science and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He was president of the History of Science Society from 1968 to 1970 and the society awarded him its highest honor, the Sarton Medal, in 1982. Kuhn was also the recipient in 1977 of the Howard T. Behrman Award for distinguished achievement in the humanities and in 1983 of the celebrated John Desmond Bernal award. Kuhn died on 17 June 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after suffering for two years from cancer of the throat and bronchial tubes. 6. References and Further Reading a. Kuhn’s Work a Kuhn’s work Kuhn Papers, MIT MC 240, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA. Kuhn, T. S. (1957) The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1963) ‘The function of dogma in scientific research’, in A.C. Crombie, ed. Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Technical Invention, From Antiquity to the Present. New York: Basic Books, pp. 347-69. Kuhn, T. S., Heilbron, J. L., Forman, P. and Allen, L. (1967) Sources for History of Quantum Physics: An Inventory and Report. Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society. Heilbron, J. L., and Kuhn, T. S. (1969) ‘The genesis of the Bohr atom’. Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1, 211-90. Kuhn, T. S. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd edition). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1977) The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Science Tradition and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1987) Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (revised edition). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1990) ‘Dubbing and redubbing: the vulnerability of rigid designation’, in C.W. Savage, ed. Scientific Theories. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 298-318. Kuhn, T. S. (2000) The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Contains a comprehensive interview with Kuhn covering his life and work. b. Secondary Sources Andersen, H. (2001) On Kuhn. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. A general introduction to Kuhn and his philosophy. Andersen, H., Barker, P. and Chen, X. (2006) The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions. New York: Cambridge University Press. Barnes, B. (1982) T.S. Kuhn and Social Science. London: Macmillan Press. Discusses the impact of Kuhn’s philosophy for the sociology of science. Bernardoni, J. (2009) Knowing Nature without Mirrors: Thomas Kuhn’s Antirepresentationalist Objectivity. Saarbrücken, DE: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller. Bird, A. (2000) Thomas Kuhn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. A critical introduction to Kuhn’s philosophy of science. Bird, A. (2012) ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and its significance: an essay review of the fiftieth anniversary edition’. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 63, 859-83. Buchwald, J. Z. and Smith, G. E. (1997) ‘Thomas S. Kuhn, 1922-1996’. Philosophy of Science, 64, 361-76. D’Agostino, F. (2010) Naturalizing Epistemology: Thomas Kuhn and the Essential Tension. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Davidson, K. (2006) The Death of Truth: Thomas S. Kuhn and the Evolution of Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press. Favretti, R. R., Sandri, G. and Scazzieri, R., eds. (1999) Incommensurability and Transl
7992	dbpedia	0	92	https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Kuhn%252C%2BThomas	en	Kuhn%2C+Thomas	http://img.tfd.com/TFDlogo1200x1200.png	http://img.tfd.com/TFDlogo1200x1200.png	[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Looking for Kuhn%2C+Thomas? Find out information about Kuhn%2C+Thomas. Explanation of Kuhn%2C+Thomas		https://img.tfd.com/favicon.ico	TheFreeDictionary.com	null
7992	dbpedia	1	31	https://softschools.com/facts/scientists/thomas_kuhn_facts/1908/	en	Thomas Kuhn Facts			[ "https://softschools.com/images/logo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "Thomas Kuhn", "facts", "Thomas Kuhn facts", "Thomas Kuhn facts for kids", "fun facts about Thomas Kuhn" ]	null	[]	null	Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 to June 17, 1996) was an American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science. In 1962 he published his most famous book, <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i>, in which he popularized the term "paradigm shift."	en			null	Interesting Thomas Kuhn Facts: Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his father Samuel Kuhn was an industrial engineer. In 1940 he graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. In 1943 he earned a B.S. in physics from Harvard University. He earned his M.S. in 1946 and his PhD in 1949 at Harvard. Kuhn credits his three years as a Harvard Junior Fellow for his insight into the theory of scientific thought. From 1948 to 1956 he taught the history of science at Harvard. He transferred to University of California, Berkeley and taught in both the philosophy and history departments. Kuhn interviewed Niels Bohr just before Bohr's death. While he was at Berkeley he published The Structure of Scientific Thought. In it he introduced the controversial idea that the subjective worldview of the investigator influences and colors his scientific interpretation. He stated that the history of scientific progress is not linear but that it undergoes periodic revolutions in which a field of study is abruptly transformed. In 1964 he became the M.Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. From 1979 to 1991 he was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kuhn's work has had enormous impact in several fields. In the philosophy of science it expanded the vocabulary to encompass the everyday workings of science. In sociology, he is a force behind the post Mertonian Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. He work also influenced the Humanities and was used to distinguish between historical and scientific communities and between political and religious groups.
7992	dbpedia	3	28	https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/thomas-kuhn/introduction/6722048A0AA4EDE6D1BBA402998EA00F	en	Introduction	https://www.cambridge.or…hare_600x600.jpg	https://www.cambridge.or…hare_600x600.jpg	[ "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/icn_circle__btn_close_white.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.png", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.svg", "https://assets.cambridge.org/97805217/96484/cover/9780521796484.jpg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/page-component/img/share-icon.cbcfad8.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/page-component/img/close-icon.194b28a.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/page-component/img/cite-icon.44eaaa4.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/cambridge_logo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Hoyningen-Huene", "Jed Z", "Thomas Nickles", "University of Nevada" ]	null	Thomas Kuhn - October 2002	en	/core/cambridge-core/public/images/favicon.ico	Cambridge Core	https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/thomas-kuhn/introduction/6722048A0AA4EDE6D1BBA402998EA00F	Whether one is pro-Kuhn, anti-Kuhn, or neutral, no one can deny that the work of Thomas Kuhn has been a lightning rod for debates about science, culture, and policy across many academic fields – and even in the political arena and the business world. This is especially true of Kuhn's best-known work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, originally published in 1962 and expanded in 1970. By now the book has sold over a million copies in two dozen languages – numbers almost unheard of for an academic book about abstract philosophical topics. The wide reception of his work, which greatly surprised Kuhn himself, has elevated the terms “paradigm,” “paradigm change,” and “paradigm shift” to household phrases and the stuff of advertising slogans, corporate boardrooms, and Washington bureaucratese. Although diverse individuals and groups have read and used (or misused!) it very differently, each according to their own abilities and needs, Kuhn's work has the merit, in these fragmented times, of serving as a common reference point and of generating cross-disciplinary discussion. When Kuhn began writing, philosophy of science, especially in England and the United States, was dominated by the logical positivists (Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Carl Hempel, and others) and by Karl Popper and his followers. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Structure hereafter), Kuhn gave us a very different picture of science. Kuhn contended that there are two types of mature physical science, “normal science” and “extraordinary” or “revolutionary science.
7992	dbpedia	0	51	https://twitter.com/philosophersmag/status/1645517009701195776	en	x.com			[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null			https://abs.twimg.com/re…ios.77d25eba.png	X (formerly Twitter)	null
7992	dbpedia	1	8	https://philosophynow.org/issues/131/Thomas_Kuhn_1922-1996	en	Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996)	https://philosophynow.or…egulars/icon.png	https://philosophynow.or…egulars/icon.png	[ "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/regulars/logo.png", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/regulars/bracket left.png", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/regulars/bracket right.png", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/regulars/follow/rss.png", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/regulars/follow/facebook.png", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/regulars/follow/instagram.png", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/regulars/follow/twitter.png", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/regulars/search.png", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/regulars/welcome covers.png", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/issues/131/Thomas Kuhn.jpg", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/regulars/print.png", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/regulars/email.png", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/regulars/share/facebook.png", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/regulars/share/twitter.png", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/regulars/share/reddit.png", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/covers/medium/issue131.jpg", "https://philosophynow.org/media/images/advertisement/website/2024-07-02-10-40-10_vra_2.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "philosophy" ]	null	[]	null	Will Bouwman considers the development of a paradigmatic revolutionary.		/media/images/regulars/icon.png		null	Will Bouwman considers the development of a paradigmatic revolutionary. In 1962 Thomas Kuhn published a book from which the philosophy of science has not yet recovered, and probably never will. Before this book it was generally assumed that the only history that was relevant to science was recent. Science was believed to be a relentless march towards the truth, every innovation an advance. Scientists may have been standing on the shoulders of giants (to quote Isaac Newton), but every change was assumed to be taking us higher. Ironically, Kuhn the philosopher did what a good scientist does, and actually looked at the evidence. What he saw was that far from being the steady, uniform accumulation of objective truth about the way the world functions, the history of science is punctuated by moments when the prevailing consensus is completely shattered. His first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), detailed the events and causes of one of the most graphic examples of this. Kuhn expanded on this picture to provide his general model of the nature of scientific progress in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Normal, and Revolutionary, Life Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father, Samuel, a veteran of World War I, was an industrial engineer and investment consultant whose wife, Minette (née Strook), was a graduate of Vassar College who wrote for and edited progressive publications. Both parents were active in left-wing politics, and in keeping with their radical outlook, Thomas was educated at various progressive schools which nurtured independent thinking rather than adhering to a traditional curriculum. Perhaps because of this, at the age of seven Thomas was still barely able to read and write; so his father took it into his own hands to bring him up to speed. The unsettled school career and frequent moves may later have made it difficult for Thomas to establish long term relationships, particularly with women. His mother prescribed a course in psychoanalysis. Hating his counsellor, who frequently fell asleep during sessions, Kuhn cured himself of his difficulties in establishing relationships by marrying Kathryn Muhs in 1948. Like his mother, Kathryn was a graduate of Vassar College. They had three children, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Nathaniel, before divorcing in 1978. Three years later Kuhn married Jehane Barton Burns. His early literacy problems apart, Kuhn was an outstanding student with a particular interest in maths and physics. He was admitted to Harvard in 1940. America entered World War II during Kuhn’s second year as an undergraduate, and after gaining a BSc in physics in 1943 with the highest honours, Kuhn joined the Radio Research Laboratory, which had been set up to develop countermeasures to enemy radar systems. This took him initially to Britain and later into liberated France and Germany itself, to examine captured equipment first hand. On his return to Harvard, Kuhn continued studying physics as the most convenient route to gaining a doctorate, which he achieved in 1949, although his commitment to physics was dwindling as his interest in philosophy was growing. While working on his PhD, he was invited to teach a course in the History of Science to undergraduates, and it was while preparing for this that he had the insight that was to inspire his most influential work. One of the key moments in the development of his ideas was his study of Aristotle. The view of science at the time was that it is accumulative; so Kuhn went looking into Aristotle’s ancestral physics, expecting to find the foundations on which Galileo, Newton et al had later built. Instead, Kuhn was baffled to discover that Aristotle’s understanding of physics was, from a modern point of view, complete nonsense. Struggling to comprehend how someone so wrong could be so revered, Kuhn realised that in order to appreciate Aristotle he had to understand the context in which Aristotle had been working. In doing so, he drew a picture of science that was completely different to most contemporary analyses. The Scientific Method, Historically Speaking In the middle of the twentieth century the philosophy of science was almost exclusively focussed on defining the scientific method. The assumption was that science is an objective ideal method independent of human foibles, and if we could just describe its characteristics then everyone would have a template for doing proper science. The debate was largely between the logical positivists and Karl Popper. Both sides took the view that science was a rational endeavour, and that scientists obediently followed where the evidence led them. Broadly speaking, the logical positivists stuck to the traditional view that science was the accumulation of facts and the refinement of mathematical models that accounted for those facts with ever-increasing accuracy. Their distinctive feature was they insisted that science should stick strictly to observable facts and avoid building theories not directly supported by those facts. Logical positivism advocated the ‘verification principle’ promoted by A.J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic. This demanded that anything that could not be supported by empirical evidence or strict logic was metaphysics and had no place in science (or indeed, anywhere else). One major problem – which in fairness the logical positivists were well aware of – is that no amount of empirical evidence (or logic) can prove a scientific claim. The classic example is that a million white swans do not prove that every swan is white. Popper’s innovation was to point out that it only takes one black swan to prove that the proposition ‘all swans are white’ is false. So the evidence could show you either what was only likely to be true, or what was definitely false. Therefore, as an endeavour seeking certainty, science should commit itself to trying to prove its own theories wrong. This is Popper’s principle of falsification. The Structure of Kuhn’s Revolution By looking at the historical evidence concerning science itself, Kuhn believed that he could see a pattern in the data (this is after all part of what physicists are trained to do). According to Kuhn, history showed that most scientific research, in whatever field of science, is guided by a set of principles and core beliefs about which there is a general consensus. The word Kuhn used for this guiding intellectual framework was ‘paradigm’. For instance, before Copernicus turned it upside down, Aristotle’s model of the universe, which put the Earth at its centre, was accepted for two thousand years. Some of the data was puzzling, and couldn’t easily be reconciled with this model, but scientists and mathematicians, most notably Ptolemy, worked within the paradigm to solve those puzzles. During that time, astronomers were able to plot and predict the positions of the heavenly bodies with an accuracy that is remarkable, especially given that later technological advances (not least the telescope) have shown the model to be demonstrably false; but for the scientific purposes of the time, Aristotle’s model worked. Working within the bounds of a paradigm is what Kuhn called ‘normal science’, and this is what these Aristotelian cosmologists were doing. In this way, the practise of medieval astronomers resembles the practice of the scientific method that most philosophers of science were trying to model. It is only in the rare occasions of scientific revolutions, when the data can absolutely not be made to fit the existing paradigm, that the paradigm itself changes. This is called ‘revolutionary science’ by Kuhn. One of Kuhn’s early essays was called ‘The Essential Tension’ (1959). In it he discusses the conflicting pulls of the desire to innovate and the conservatism needed to do normal science. For every revolutionary Einstein, there are thousands of normal scientists who do the routine calculations that keep the scientific world ticking along. Most normal scientists are content to use a paradigm which for all current purposes works extremely well. Contrary to Popper’s recommendation, they don’t abandon a paradigm because they can’t fit a set of data into it: they may instead seek to modify the paradigm until the data fits it. A modern case is creating the ideas of dark matter and energy to fit galactic movement within the paradigm of Einstein’s General Relativity. Of course, there are also revolutionary scientists trying to develop new paradigms which aim to explain the same evidence in innovative ways. There are, for instance, many novel quantum theories which seek to incorporate gravity, of which String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity are just two examples. Among the most controversial aspects of Kuhn’s model of science, is his claim that different paradigms are ‘incommensurable’. That is to say, in extreme cases, there can be no meaningful dialogue between scientists who hold the different perspectives. That the same evidence can inspire different worldviews is often illustrated by the duck/rabbit illusion. The point Kuhn was making is that if you’re talking about a duck, you are going to make no sense to someone seeing a rabbit. String Theorists look at the universe and see eleven dimensions, whereas according to Loop Quantum Gravity, there are only four. This raises another issue for which Kuhn’s paradigm model is criticised. How do you decide whether you are looking at a duck or a rabbit? The ‘theory-dependence of observation’ is this idea that exactly the same information can be interpreted in different ways. Kuhn argued that just as your worldview is influenced by your experience, so your scientific paradigm is determined in part by the education you’ve had. This led to accusations of relativism, which Kuhn tried to counter by saying that there are objective criteria for deciding between paradigmatic theories: 1. How accurately a theory agrees with the evidence. 2. It’s consistent within itself and with other accepted theories. 3. It should explain more than just the phenomenon it was designed to explain. 4. The simplest explanation is the best. (In other words, apply Occam’s Razor.) 5. It should make predictions that come true. However, Kuhn had to concede that there is no objective way to establish which of those criteria is the most important, and so scientists would make their own mind up for subjective reasons. In choosing between competing theories, two scientists “fully committed to the same list of criteria for choice may nevertheless reach different conclusions.” Eventually though, according to Kuhn, a new, revolutionary model is found that most people settle down to developing, by using the new model to solve puzzles in the way of normal science. The Reception of the Revolution Many philosophers and physical scientists were initially sceptical, hostile even, to the depiction of scientists as normal people who held opinions and made decisions for idiosyncratic reasons. Social scientists, on the other hand, were inspired by The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to develop their discipline. Prior to publication, the most influential sociologist of science was Robert Merton, whose main focus had been on why scientific theories are rejected. After the Revolutions, sociologists largely turned to why scientific theories are believed. In a way, Kuhn’s masterpiece was a product of exactly the sort of process it was describing. While ‘normal’ philosophers of science – the logical positivists and Popper – were working within a certain paradigm of what science was about, there was an accumulation of troubling anomalies. For instance, scientists such as Ludwik Fleck and Michael Polyani were pointing out that in their experience science didn’t actually work in the way that those philosophers assumed. Kuhn acknowledged his debt to both men. He also quoted the physicist Max Planck: “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it” (Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, 1949). For better or worse, Kuhn’s book changed the way science is viewed. Science is no longer straightforwardly an ideal method of gaining knowledge to which people should aspire; rather it is something shaped by ordinary, and a few extraordinary, people. Kuhn spent much of his subsequent career elucidating and dealing with the fallout. It’s a major part of his legacy that now so does almost everyone else in the philosophy of science. “When reading the works of an important thinker,” he said, “look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them” (‘The Essential Tension’). This is now what many sociologists and most philosophers of science are compelled to do. Thomas Kuhn retired in 1991, age 69. In 1994 he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat and lungs. He died two years later, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged 73. © Will Bouwman 2019 Will Bouwman is the author of Einstein on the Train and Other Stories: How to Make Sense of the Big Bang, Quantum Mechanics and Relativity.
7992	dbpedia	3	12	https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/thomas-kuhns-revolutions-a-historical-and-an-evolutionary-philosophy-of-science/	en	Thomas Kuhn's Revolutions: A Historical and an Evolutionary Philosophy of Science?	https://ndpr.nd.edu/styl…ome-1200x800.jpg	https://ndpr.nd.edu/styl…ome-1200x800.jpg	[ "https://ndpr.nd.edu/assets/411567/300x480/placeholder_review.png", "https://static.nd.edu/images/marks/gray/ndmark.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "John A. Schuster", "University of Sydney" ]	2016-05-30T22:00:00-05:00	This work extends and expands James A. Marcum's Thomas Kuhn's Revolution: An Historical Philosophy of Science (2005). Scholarship and debate about Kuhn ...	en	/favicon.ico	Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews	https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/thomas-kuhns-revolutions-a-historical-and-an-evolutionary-philosophy-of-science/	This work extends and expands James A. Marcum's Thomas Kuhn's Revolution: An Historical Philosophy of Science (2005). Scholarship and debate about Kuhn have continued apace since then, chiefly conducted by philosophers and mainly concerned with Kuhn's later thought and its relation to Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 1970) [SSR]. Marcum takes up the theme that Kuhn's later work -- scattered in occasional papers, talks and manuscript sources -- constituted a second Kuhnian revolution in philosophy of science, this time being an 'evolutionary' [EPS] as opposed to his earlier 'historical' philosophy of science. Marcum's 2005 volume was essentially a history of a book, SSR, its genesis, content and reception in HPS and other fields. The present work preserves virtually all of that material while expanding in two ways: an account of the genesis and content of Kuhn's second philosophy of science, and a much more detailed examination than previously of what we might term, in succinct but outdated history-of -ideas lingo, the 'influence' of Kuhn. Thus, in the opening two Parts of the new work, Marcum stays close to the corresponding Parts of the earlier work. Part III, which concluded the earlier work and was titled 'The path following Structure', is now titled 'Kuhn's paradigm shift' [that is toward EPS] and Chapter 5 within it is still concerned mainly with 'What was Kuhn up to after Structure', while Chapter 6 deals explicitly with Kuhn's EPS, replacing the old Chapter 6 dealing with 'Kuhn's legacy'. The latter issue now takes up its own Part IV, in two full chapters, the first dealing with Kuhn's 'impact' on HPS and the natural sciences, the latter with his 'impact' on behavioural, social and political sciences. Returning to the Kuhn debates after a decade, Marcum now has a work at least 30% longer than the original, girded by a bibliography at least three times as voluminous and featuring not only works published since 2005, but also quite a few earlier works not treated in his original volume. Readers can again benefit from Marcum's no-nonsense chronological account of the origin of SSR and especially from his examination of Kuhn's early Lowell Lectures (32-36), still in manuscript, which contain the embryonic forms of several key SSR themes. As before, Marcum perceptively views SSR more as a process of genesis and then revision and rethinking in the heat of philosophical battle, rather than a finished work (as of 1962 or 1970). Similarly, the great benefit to the reader of the new and expanded portions of the work is Marcum's workmanlike and chronological setting out of the development of Kuhn's second coming in the philosophy of science. Marcum sees EPS as improving upon SSR by answering or creatively outflanking highly debated points about incommensurability and the pattern of development and proliferation of the sciences. Kuhnian incommensurability is now located in non-cumulative shifts in the 'lexical taxonomy' of kinds terms specific to an expert scientific field. Agreed shifts in a lexicon, emergent from the need to solve recalcitrant research puzzles, produce splitting, increased specialisation and a Darwinian looking branching evolution of the sciences. Heated philosophical debates about the later Kuhn are treated dispassionately if at times a bit too cryptically, summary replacing firm positioning and argument back into the debate. The latter point begins to signal my chief concerns about the book, which may be condensed to this question: "Is this book a worthy and useful textbook or a concerted, serious intellectual history (including intellectual biography, of course)?" I believe the book tries to be both but winds up slightly but noticeably missing each target. This is a shame, because the book promises much, by scope, quantity of scholarship, and Marcum's own power of expression. The book has the look and feel of a textbook: each chapter is prefaced with a set off 'summary' and ends with an in-text 'summary section'; the style is brisk, and the text rolls through summaries of texts, papers, books and debates. As an historian of science who taught Kuhn at introductory, advanced undergraduate and post graduate levels for 40 years, I can testify that Marcum's work cannot be used at entry level, and would have to be selectively used at an advanced (or English and Australian style 'honours') undergraduate level. For example, in my honours level course, for third year HPS majors, I would have avoided Marcum's material expounding SSR and the blow by blow account of the current debates over Kuhn's EPS; but, the intellectual biography of Kuhn leading to SSR and the treatment of Kuhn's earlier published and unpublished works would have been assigned. I would not recommend this book to history of science post graduates in any way under my tutelage, for reasons set out below. The book's best use as a textbook would be for philosophers of science, advanced students and their practitioner instructors, looking for a quick first guide to Kuhn's struggles to write, defend and then revise SSR, and as a similar sort of guide to the key points and literature of the initial philosophical Kuhn debates. However, using Marcum as a handbook would have limitations, because he avoids deep excursions into interpretative explication. For example, whilst we get a detailed and well documented chronological overview of the debates concerning the later Kuhn, we learn of Kuhn's views only piecemeal from quick looks at the very scattered pieces in which it resides. There is little attempt, first to synthesise a 'Marcum version' of the 'later Kuhn's EPS', which could then have been used as the sounding board and explicatory bass note when marching chronologically through the debate. This lack of deep interpretation and reconstruction elides into the problem of the book not being particularly convincing intellectual history. Serious intellectual history and intellectual biography consist in more than presenting a chronological set of textual summaries, even if some of those texts are parts of debates. Any number of serious historical narratives cum explanations of, say, the emergence of SSR, might be grounded on such a chronological archive as Marcum provides, but they would have to go quite a bit further, in terms of interpretation and analysis of the agendas, resources in play, problems and struggles of Kuhn and his key interlocutors. For example, Marcum's treatment of Alexandre Koyré is peremptory, consisting of several brief mentions at different chronological points (11, 26, 38, 75, 112). We learn little about what Koyré was trying to do, and how Kuhn struggled within and beyond Koyré's dispensation. It is perhaps not well known that in the late 1960s and early 1970s Kuhn would summon his first year Princeton HPS graduate students to a meeting with him on their first day. To this gathering he would bring his tattered copy of Koyré's Études Galiléennes, the 1939 edition. (Of course there was no English translation until 1978.) He would hold it up and pronounce, "Nobody is getting out of here until they have read this." Kuhn meant nobody would graduate who did not come to understand Koyré (and Kuhn himself) as practitioners of textual analysis and internalist history of science writing. Kuhn was devoted to Koyré: He took up and pluralized Koyré's notion of the centrality of metaphysics -- the metaphysics of any given real science need not be Galileo and Copernicus's watered down neo-Platonism. Kuhn searched for what Koyré's notion of ruptural revolution lacked, to wit, an explanation of what it was about science dynamics that led to and shaped revolutions (enter eventually normal science). Kuhn shared and disseminated Koyré's disdain for doctrines of scientific method as keys to scientific practice and the shape of the history of the sciences. He also less fortuitously was led by Koyré's catastrophism to downplay the creativity of normal science, the role of small but significant discoveries in science, and to miss the dynamics of what we might call the politics of experiment. Koyré is not just one amongst many items in a chronology; he was the single most important resource and constraint (I do not use the language of 'influences') in the making of the younger Kuhn's practice as an historian and in setting his problematic, for better and worse as it turned out.[1] Similarly, the portions of the book on the later Kuhn are at best only preparatory to an intellectual history of the older Kuhn and Kuhnianism. This is because Marcum consistently refuses to take completely seriously Kuhn the historian, his practices and his limitations, as well as Kuhn's complex, nuanced role(s) in the evolution of post-Kuhnian views in history of science, and its related field, early post-Kuhnian sociology of scientific knowledge (hereafter SSK). This statement requires that I begin with a disclosure of interest. I was a graduate student of Kuhn at Princeton 1969-73, followed by a year as his colleague in the HPS Program there. Like almost all the Program's graduate students I was in the 'history side' of the Program and formally a member of the Princeton History Department. In addition I was a participant, from the late 1970s in the evolution of 'post-Kuhnian' history of science (and sociology of scientific knowledge). What happened in these domains, say in the generation after about 1980, gets almost no mention. It is striking that the only historians of natural science mentioned in any detail by Marcum are those historians of modern physics, such as Norton Wise, John Heilbron, Paul Forman, Jed Buchwald, and Peter Galison, all but the last of whom studied with Kuhn and who all kept up scholarly dialogue with and about him. The evolution of the wider field of history of science is not discussed. It is as though every time Marcum mentions HPS, he ends up focussing on the P not the H. He brushes aside the history dimension of Kuhn's Princeton years (1964-79), not mentioning his extensive teaching of historians of science. Later he embroiders this with the claim that Kuhn had no school because he had few graduate students (25-26). In fact Kuhn's Princeton years were the ones in which he did the most training of postgraduate history students in his entire career. Kuhn had intense dealings with quite a few Princeton history of science graduate students in graduate courses (called seminars at Princeton), especially through large sessional research projects carried out in those seminars. Many of those taught by him went on to successful and often influential careers in the history of science profession.[2] At Princeton Kuhn did not conduct graduate seminars on his philosophy of science. He offered internalist, almost entirely primary source based seminars on themes like heat theory and thermodynamics, 1700-1900; or electricity and magnetism Gilbert to Maxwell. One was learning how to dissect primary sources, in the manner of Koyré, and how to construct narratives about the give and take of debate concerning theoretical and evidential claims and counter claims in small networks of expert practitioners. Interestingly, history of physics had already evolved to a sophisticated level in that very key, so that Kuhn was only one of several accomplished practitioners of that style of close internal unpacking of the ebb and flow of technical papers and debate.[3] But there was more on offer from Kuhn for Princeton history of science students. Kuhn would often rush to the black board, improvising diagrams concerning the development and interrelations of 'traditions' (never paradigms!) in the history of the physical and experimental sciences. He was thinking out loud prior to writing his essay on 'Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science'. Therefore, we tended to think that Kuhn was not only showing us how to read primary sources and do close textual hermeneutics and reconstruction of local debates, but that he was also giving real time examples of how one should try to imagine longer patterns of development into which the smaller studies might fit. Why is it important to mention Kuhn's relation to apprentice historians of science in the Princeton years? Firstly, all these people later wrote history of science themselves and had some students who also entered the field, and secondly, because this style of close blow by blow reconstruction of the negotiation of knowledge claims (from experimental outcomes to grand theories) was about to become the core subject matter of the wider domain of post-Kuhnian history and sociology of science. Anyone who seriously practiced history of science or sociology of scientific knowledge at the time knows that the crucial breakthrough came not with the coining, at Edinburgh, of the legitimatory meta-rhetoric about 'the Strong Program', but rather through the initially paradoxical point that the central achievement of Kuhn was to conceptualize normal science, rather than to produce his contentious account of ruptural revolution. What was required -- and it was often said in history of science circles sympathetic to the Kuhn of SSR -- was this: 'how do we articulate the concept of normal science to get a richer and more accurate picture of routine scientific practice, competition and creativity?' The key, driven home by SSK scholars, was the concept of a dynamic and creative normal science, marked by tradition-bound yet tradition-modifying actions inside expert communities. The best early post-Kuhnian exponent of this point of view was Barry Barnes, then a rising star in the Edinburgh Science Studies Unit. Barnes grasped that Kuhn was concerned with understanding traditions of scientific practice, so he stressed that we learn from instances of Kuhn's early historical case studies rather than his grand modelling in SSR. In his seminal (especially for historians) T. S. Kuhn and Social Science (1982), Barnes fleshed out the nature of a tradition of specialized scientific practice in a post-Kuhnian way, viewing normal practice within a tradition as a process of expert debate and negotiation of conceptual change, possibly small scale conceptual change. This helped shape the emergent SSK consensus that Kuhn's stark differentiation between normal and revolutionary phases in the history of a tradition of scientific practice was too strong. This view considers 'normal research' paradigms as constantly subject to partial re-negotiation and modification. If a problem can be solved only by advocating a shift in some aspect of the paradigm, however so slight, then one can say that the problem solution involves feed-back alterations to the paradigm. Such alterations are carried over into the next rounds of problem-solving where further alterations may be suggested. Of course, such bids to alter the paradigm slightly must be accepted by the relevant community. We may term a noticeable alteration of the paradigm, which has been negotiated into place, as a 'discovery'. In this way a particular expert research culture or discipline is ongoingly changed by its own competitive dynamic of seeking and accounting discoveries, which are not mere incremental changes. If you like, every discovery of this type involves small or large consensually agreed holistic shifts in the pre-existing disciplinary culture of research of that particular field. This is, by the way, the baseline meaning of incommensurability. Other foci of post Kuhnian study in history and sociology of science dovetailed with these insights, in particular new understandings about the nature of experiment and about experimental hardware as previously consensually agreed nexuses of theory/standards and practice. Consequently, as Stephen Shapin and others could easily note by the early 1990s, the old internalist/externalist dualism in historiography of science was transcended.[4] Each science now had a post-Kuhnian 'inside' of experts competing and playing the discovery game. Additionally, one could now examine empirically and case by case how, when and why some actors within an expert field might elect to recruit, and adapt for play inside their field, various cognitive, normative or material resources from wider domains outside that field -- whether neighboring expert fields or wider social contexts. This fruitful or what I sometimes term 'classic' version of post-Kuhnian history and sociology of science should not be mistaken for the varieties of revived, old fashioned 'externalism' -- aping the old Marxist direct social imprinting of scientific content -- rolled out today as purportedly 'Kuhnian' and preached in sub-optimal corners of 'science studies' and 'STS'. None of what I have reported in the last five paragraphs is registered by Marcum. He does not look broadly at history of science after SSR. He certainly states that Kuhn had a very significant impact on sociology of science (201). But, rather than ask what post-Kuhnian SSK really was and what it gave to better forms of history of science, he essentially accounts post-Kuhnian sociology of scientific knowledge to have been that vaporous rhetorical phantom of 'the Strong Program' (214-216), apparently important only because it paved the way for various post-modern pastimes. For example, he has the Strong Program debouching on Feminism (218-220). Explaining this by means of the work of Evelyn Fox Keller, Marcum misses the irony (pointed out over a quarter of a century ago by Richards and Schuster) that Keller's feminist post-Kuhnianism harbors a very non-Kuhnian belief in putatively efficacious grand methods, feminine (good) and masculine (not so good), both beliefs being in fact myths explicable by garden variety classic post-Kuhnian insights.[5] Of course these trends in history and sociology of science did not result simply from reading Kuhn. He was absorbed and re-evaluated in the light of other stimuli, for example in many cases a belated encounter with Gaston Bachelard (still largely available only in French), or with the newly available (1979) English translation of Ludwik Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, the original 1935 German version of which Kuhn mentioned in the Preface to SSR. Also important for historians of science at the time was the seminal work of Jerome Ravetz. His Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (1971) foreshadowed the emerging SSK with a deep and rich revised heuristic model, worked out in over 200 pages, of how 'normal' science worked as a tradition-bound yet novelty and discovery producing machinery. When it came to sociology of science, Kuhn, given his intellectual upbringing and proclivities, always adhered in the final analysis to Robert K. Merton's Parsonian functionalist views. Yet it was through attempts simultaneously to transcend both Kuhn and Merton that in the 1970s and 80s scholars such as Barnes, Shapin, R.G.A. Dolby, John Law, M.D. King and Michael Mulkay felt their way to post-Kuhnian SSK. One could also mention here the important emphasis of Pierre Bourdieu on competition in science and an economy of symbolic capital. Kuhn showed no constructive interest in any of this, much less the Schutzian interpretive and phenomenological sociology that resided deep below the efforts of some of the SSK scholars. There are two ironies in Kuhn's trajectory that do relate directly to post-Kuhnian history and sociology of science, and neither is sighted clearly by Marcum. The first irony concerns the younger Kuhn, when he was practicing as a historian of science in the lead up to SSR. It turns out that Kuhn had hit upon elements of the later post-Kuhnian view of normal science, only to overwrite them with the grand pronouncements of SSR. In late 1961 Kuhn finished his dazzling paper on the 'Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery'.[6] What interested him was the idea that significant discoveries are not simple 'events' in which a new fact or law is slotted cumulatively into a growing edifice of scientific knowledge. Significant discoveries arise from complex historical processes and they ecologically alter the structure of knowledge through which they are produced, rather than simply adding to it. A discovery can mark an 'upheaval' of established 'theory and practice', as did the discovery of oxygen; or it can be subtle, like the effect of the discovery of Uranus upon the expectation that similar patterns of anomaly would henceforth best be handled by postulating additional planets. Thus Kuhn came very close to what was later taken as the dynamic, and creative, nature of normal science, characteristic of post-Kuhnian thinking in history and sociology of science. But he never realized the potential of the notion of significant discovery -- and it was precisely his work on revolutionary change, growing from normal science as puzzle solving and 'mopping up' that occluded and marginalized it.[7] Marcum (44-51) discusses three of Kuhn's important immediately pre-SSR papers but not the discovery paper.[8] This leads to the second irony, which concerns the older Kuhn. He did eventually intersect with the trajectory of post-Kuhnian history and sociology of science. Yes, the older Kuhn, like Marcum, would still stigmatize 'The Strong Program'. But the better forms of post-Kuhnian history and sociology of science had already staked out positions not a million miles from what we can glean from the older Kuhn, reading him, as usual, as a possible heuristic guide to history of science practice. His EPS and his views expressed in 'What is Wrong with Historical Philosophy of Science' can be mapped back onto some post-Kuhnian themes, provided we do not vulgarize or misunderstand what those themes were. Kuhn's EPS with its retooled concept of incommensurability, grounded in tracing non-cumulative shifts in the 'lexicon' of an expert field -- thereby producing fission, specialization and branching evolution of scientific fields -- seems like one more version of the better sort of post-Kuhnian history and sociology of science understandings. This is especially the case when we factor in Kuhn's treatment of the 'values' (accuracy, coherent, fruitfulness etc.) deployed in 'theory choice' by disciplinary experts exercising reasonable but differential weightings and interpretations of these values. (This being yet another of his views that seeped into post-Kuhnian history and sociology of science.) Like his scholar Marcum, Kuhn missed the history and sociology boat because he was busy debating on the docks with philosophers. Understanding Kuhn's roles in post-Kuhnian history and sociology of science enhances his gigantic stature in later twentieth century intellectual history. Kuhn's historic standing certainly does not depend on what Marcum clearly shows to be the habitual importation of vulgar versions of the younger Kuhn into any and every field you would care to mention, there providing superficial accounting resources for their endless rhetorical 'bickering' about disciplinary definition, boundaries and status. Kuhn was a great figure in our epoch of intellectual history firstly because, as Marcum documents, he sparked in philosophy of science two rounds of deep debate which have in part shaped the history of that discipline over two generations. But, Marcum ignores the processes through which Kuhn became transformative in his other two home disciplines, history and sociology of science. Here, as happens with truly significant figures, Kuhn's work was selectively and creatively woven into a greater fabric of discussion, in this case involving post-Kuhnian elucidations of the blow by blow non-incremental dynamics of scientific change and the modes of transaction between the expert insiders of traditions in their wider contexts. Like Hegel or Freud, Kuhn may not have liked what succeeding generations did in his name, but as our learned post-Kuhnian SSK colleagues have long insisted, the meaning of a discovery claim is in the hands of its subsequent users. [Note: there are a number of errors, and typos in this work. Readers will easily spot them at pages 38, 40, 48, 58, 75 (in 1962 Charles Gillespie was Kuhn's future 'chair' at Princeton, not his 'former' one, 148 (the items 'Hull 1988 a,b' do not exist in the Bibliography), 186 201, 230.]
7992	dbpedia	0	10	https://jnnielsen.medium.com/thomas-kuhn-7c7d8a499014	en	Thomas Kuhn	https://miro.medium.com/…a33CxDf1IlrQ.png	https://miro.medium.com/…a33CxDf1IlrQ.png	[ "https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fill:64:64/1dmbNkD5D-u45r44go_cf0g.png", "https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fill:88:88/1Zd52LO9MvgrK2OcEg05Wig.jpeg", "https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fill:144:144/1*Zd52LO9MvgrK2OcEg05Wig.jpeg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Nick Nielsen", "jnnielsen.medium.com" ]	2023-07-19T01:23:09.757000+00:00	Today is the 101st anniversary of the birth of Thomas Kuhn (18 July 1922–17 June 1996), who was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1922. Kuhn is not remembered as a philosopher of history, but as a…	en	https://miro.medium.com/v2/5d8de952517e8160e40ef9841c781cdc14a5db313057fa3c3de41c6f5b494b19	Medium	https://jnnielsen.medium.com/thomas-kuhn-7c7d8a499014	Today is the 101st anniversary of the birth of Thomas Kuhn (18 July 1922–17 June 1996), who was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1922. Kuhn is not remembered as a philosopher of history, but as a philosopher and an historian of science, yet the influential work he produced has had profound implications for how we understand history, and in particular for how we understanding the history of science. You could call Kuhn’s work, if you liked, a philosophy of the history of science. And given the outsize role that science plays in the history of industrialized civilization, a philosophy of the history of science is a large part of a philosophy of the history of industrialized civilization. That is no small contribution. A reductionist account of Kuhn’s philosophy is that scientific progress is not cumulative, but proceeds in fits and starts, with many losses along the way. There is an ongoing debate among Kuhn’s heirs as to whether theory change in science is ultimately a rational process, even if non-linear, or if it is ultimately an irrational process, essentially arbitrary, and without deeper meaning. If this is reflected upward to the history of industrialized civilization, which is predicated upon science, and the technology that science makes possible, then the ongoing debate is about whether the history of our civilization is ultimately rational, even if it jumps around in the short term, or whether it is ultimately irrational and arbitrary. That’s just the disputed portion of Kuhn’s interpretation, about which one can be hopeful or despairing. The undisputed portion of Kuhn’s interpretation, again, reflected upward, is that a civilization based on science and technology is not cumulative, but more like Gould and Eldridge’s punctuated equilibrium: institutions that have been stable for a long period of time, perhaps over the longue durée, can suddenly be upended in the paradigm shift when old principles are abandoned, and new principles eventually take their place. Come to think of it, this is pretty much how modern industrialized civilization came into being: the nearly static medieval world endured for about a millennium, but then when things started to change, they changed rapidly and drastically. Old certainties that seem to have stood the test of time were abandoned forthwith, and new uncertainties had to take their place. Of course, Kuhn doesn’t say what I have written above; generally speaking, he doesn’t project from his history of science to the history of civilization, but he does touch briefly upon civilization in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: “Inevitably those remarks will suggest that the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell’s 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be. Furthermore, that suggestion is not altogether inappropriate. There are losses as well as gains in scientific revolutions, and scientists tend to be peculiarly blind to the former. On the other hand, no explanation of progress through revolutions may stop at this point. To do so would be to imply that in the sciences might makes right, a formulation which would again not be entirely wrong if it did not suppress the nature of the process and of the authority by which the choice between paradigms is made. If authority alone, and particularly if non-professional authority, were the arbiter of paradigm debates, the outcome of those debates might still be revolution, but it would not be scientific revolution. The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community. Just how special that community must be if science is to survive and grow may be indicated by the very tenuousness of humanity’s hold on the scientific enterprise. Every civilization of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and so on. In many cases those facets of civilization have been as developed as our own. But only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe in the last four centuries. No other place and time has supported the very special communities from which scientific productivity comes.” Kuhn explicitly addresses philosophy of history in one of the essays in The Essential Tension, more or less to disavow that he has any philosophy of history: “During my days as a philosophically inclined physicist, my view of history resembled that of the covering law theorists, and the philosophers in my seminars usually begin by viewing it in a similar way. What changed my mind and often changes their’s is the experience of putting together a historical narrative. That experience is vital, for the difference between learning history and doing it is far larger than that in most other creative fields, philosophy certainly included. From it I conclude, among other things, that an ability to predict the future is no part of the historian’s arsenal. He is neither a social scientist nor a seer. It is no mere accident that he knows the end of his narrative as well as the start before he begins to write. History cannot be written without that information. Though I have no alternate philosophy of history or of historical explanation to offer here, I can at least outline a better image of the historian’s task and suggest why its performance might produce a sort of understanding.” While Kuhn had no explicitly formulated philosophy of history, there is much in the understanding of history that is implicit in Kuhn, for example, in the above passage, there is the distinction between learning history and doing history. What exactly is doing history? Presumably this could be writing history, or teaching history… it could even mean studying history, though the latter would certainly also count as learning history. In the above, for Kuhn doing history is “putting together a historical narrative.” He also suggests that doing history may produce a sort of understanding. Is this the sort of understanding that we derive (or hope to derive) from a philosophy of history? Is a philosophical understanding of history best to be had from putting together an historical narrative?
7992	dbpedia	2	3	https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/19/thomas-kuhn-structure-scientific-revolutions	en	Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science	https://i.guim.co.uk/img…4d6590e2e7381403	https://i.guim.co.uk/img…4d6590e2e7381403	[ "https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6035250&cv=2.0&cj=1&cs_ucfr=0&comscorekw=History+of+science%2CPeople+in+science%2CScience%2CPhilosophy%2CScience+and+nature+books%2CPhilosophy+books%2CWorld+news%2CBooks%2CCulture", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Observer/Columnist/Columnists/2012/8/17/1345224075735/History-of-science.-009.jpg?width=465&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2020/04/13/John_Naughton.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/8/28/1346150798857/Historian-Thomas-Kuhn-008.jpg?width=220&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/8/22/1345635846440/Nikola-Tesla-023.jpg?width=220&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/8/20/1345462219006/Nikola-Tesla-in-his-labor-011.jpg?width=220&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/audio/video/2012/8/20/1345451095157/Republican-Missouri-senat-011.jpg?width=220&dpr=1&s=none" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "John Naughton", "www.theguardian.com" ]	2012-08-19T00:00:00	<p>Fifty years ago, a book by Thomas Kuhn altered the way we look at the philosophy behind science, as well as introducing the much abused phrase 'paradigm shift', as <strong>John Naughton</strong> explains</p>	en	https://assets.guim.co.u…e-touch-icon.svg	the Guardian	https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/19/thomas-kuhn-structure-scientific-revolutions	Fifty years ago this month, one of the most influential books of the 20th century was published by the University of Chicago Press. Many if not most lay people have probably never heard of its author, Thomas Kuhn, or of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but their thinking has almost certainly been influenced by his ideas. The litmus test is whether you've ever heard or used the term "paradigm shift", which is probably the most used – and abused – term in contemporary discussions of organisational change and intellectual progress. A Google search for it returns more than 10 million hits, for example. And it currently turns up inside no fewer than 18,300 of the books marketed by Amazon. It is also one of the most cited academic books of all time. So if ever a big idea went viral, this is it. The real measure of Kuhn's importance, however, lies not in the infectiousness of one of his concepts but in the fact that he singlehandedly changed the way we think about mankind's most organised attempt to understand the world. Before Kuhn, our view of science was dominated by philosophical ideas about how it ought to develop ("the scientific method"), together with a heroic narrative of scientific progress as "the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors", as the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy puts it. Before Kuhn, in other words, we had what amounted to the Whig interpretation of scientific history, in which past researchers, theorists and experimenters had engaged in a long march, if not towards "truth", then at least towards greater and greater understanding of the natural world. Kuhn's version of how science develops differed dramatically from the Whig version. Where the standard account saw steady, cumulative "progress", he saw discontinuities – a set of alternating "normal" and "revolutionary" phases in which communities of specialists in particular fields are plunged into periods of turmoil, uncertainty and angst. These revolutionary phases – for example the transition from Newtonian mechanics to quantum physics – correspond to great conceptual breakthroughs and lay the basis for a succeeding phase of business as usual. The fact that his version seems unremarkable now is, in a way, the greatest measure of his success. But in 1962 almost everything about it was controversial because of the challenge it posed to powerful, entrenched philosophical assumptions about how science did – and should – work. What made it worse for philosophers of science was that Kuhn wasn't even a philosopher: he was a physicist, dammit. Born in 1922 in Cincinnati, he studied physics at Harvard, graduating summa cum laude in 1943, after which he was swept up by the war effort to work on radar. He returned to Harvard after the war to do a PhD – again in physics – which he obtained in 1949. He was then elected into the university's elite Society of Fellows and might have continued to work on quantum physics until the end of his days had he not been commissioned to teach a course on science for humanities students as part of the General Education in Science curriculum. This was the brainchild of Harvard's reforming president, James Conant, who believed that every educated person should know something about science. The course was centred around historical case studies and teaching it forced Kuhn to study old scientific texts in detail for the first time. (Physicists, then as now, don't go in much for history.) Kuhn's encounter with the scientific work of Aristotle turned out to be a life- and career-changing epiphany. "The question I hoped to answer," he recalled later, "was how much mechanics Aristotle had known, how much he had left for people such as Galileo and Newton to discover. Given that formulation, I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all… that conclusion was standard and it might in principle have been right. But I found it bothersome because, as I was reading him, Aristotle appeared not only ignorant of mechanics, but a dreadfully bad physical scientist as well. About motion, in particular, his writings seemed to me full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation." What Kuhn had run up against was the central weakness of the Whig interpretation of history. By the standards of present-day physics, Aristotle looks like an idiot. And yet we know he wasn't. Kuhn's blinding insight came from the sudden realisation that if one is to understand Aristotelian science, one must know about the intellectual tradition within which Aristotle worked. One must understand, for example, that for him the term "motion" meant change in general – not just the change in position of a physical body, which is how we think of it. Or, to put it in more general terms, to understand scientific development one must understand the intellectual frameworks within which scientists work. That insight is the engine that drives Kuhn's great book. Kuhn remained at Harvard until 1956 and, having failed to get tenure, moved to the University of California at Berkeley where he wrote Structure… and was promoted to a professorship in 1961. The following year, the book was published by the University of Chicago Press. Despite the 172 pages of the first edition, Kuhn – in his characteristic, old-world scholarly style – always referred to it as a mere "sketch". He would doubtless have preferred to have written an 800-page doorstop. But in the event, the readability and relative brevity of the "sketch" was a key factor in its eventual success. Although the book was a slow starter, selling only 919 copies in 1962-3, by mid-1987 it had sold 650,000 copies and sales to date now stand at 1.4 million copies. For a cerebral work of this calibre, these are Harry Potter-scale numbers. Kuhn's central claim is that a careful study of the history of science reveals that development in any scientific field happens via a series of phases. The first he christened "normal science" – business as usual, if you like. In this phase, a community of researchers who share a common intellectual framework – called a paradigm or a "disciplinary matrix" – engage in solving puzzles thrown up by discrepancies (anomalies) between what the paradigm predicts and what is revealed by observation or experiment. Most of the time, the anomalies are resolved either by incremental changes to the paradigm or by uncovering observational or experimental error. As philosopher Ian Hacking puts it in his terrific preface to the new edition of Structure: "Normal science does not aim at novelty but at clearing up the status quo. It tends to discover what it expects to discover." The trouble is that over longer periods unresolved anomalies accumulate and eventually get to the point where some scientists begin to question the paradigm itself. At this point, the discipline enters a period of crisis characterised by, in Kuhn's words, "a proliferation of compelling articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals". In the end, the crisis is resolved by a revolutionary change in world-view in which the now-deficient paradigm is replaced by a newer one. This is the paradigm shift of modern parlance and after it has happened the scientific field returns to normal science, based on the new framework. And so it goes on. This brutal summary of the revolutionary process does not do justice to the complexity and subtlety of Kuhn's thinking. To appreciate these, you have to read his book. But it does perhaps indicate why Structure… came as such a bombshell to the philosophers and historians who had pieced together the Whig interpretation of scientific progress. As an illustration, take Kuhn's portrayal of "normal" science. The most influential philosopher of science in 1962 was Karl Popper, described by Hacking as "the most widely read, and to some extent believed, by practising scientists". Popper summed up the essence of "the" scientific method in the title of one of his books: Conjectures and Refutations. According to Popper, real scientists (as opposed to, say, psychoanalysts) were distinguished by the fact that they tried to refute rather than confirm their theories. And yet Kuhn's version suggested that the last thing normal scientists seek to do is to refute the theories embedded in their paradigm! Many people were also enraged by Kuhn's description of most scientific activity as mere "puzzle-solving" – as if mankind's most earnest quest for knowledge was akin to doing the Times crossword. But in fact these critics were over-sensitive. A puzzle is something to which there is a solution. That doesn't mean that finding it is easy or that it will not require great ingenuity and sustained effort. The unconscionably expensive quest for the Higgs boson that has recently come to fruition at Cern, for example, is a prime example of puzzle-solving because the existence of the particle was predicted by the prevailing paradigm, the so-called "standard model" of particle physics. But what really set the cat among the philosophical pigeons was one implication of Kuhn's account of the process of paradigm change. He argued that competing paradigms are "incommensurable": that is to say, there exists no objective way of assessing their relative merits. There's no way, for example, that one could make a checklist comparing the merits of Newtonian mechanics (which applies to snooker balls and planets but not to anything that goes on inside the atom) and quantum mechanics (which deals with what happens at the sub-atomic level). But if rival paradigms are really incommensurable, then doesn't that imply that scientific revolutions must be based – at least in part – on irrational grounds? In which case, are not the paradigm shifts that we celebrate as great intellectual breakthroughs merely the result of outbreaks of mob psychology? Kuhn's book spawned a whole industry of commentary, interpretation and exegesis. His emphasis on the importance of communities of scientists clustered round a shared paradigm essentially triggered the growth of a new academic discipline – the sociology of science – in which researchers began to examine scientific disciplines much as anthropologists studied exotic tribes, and in which science was regarded not as a sacred, untouchable product of the Enlightenment but as just another subculture. As for his big idea – that of a "paradigm" as an intellectual framework that makes research possible –well, it quickly escaped into the wild and took on a life of its own. Hucksters, marketers and business school professors adopted it as a way of explaining the need for radical changes of world-view in their clients. And social scientists saw the adoption of a paradigm as a route to respectability and research funding, which in due course led to the emergence of pathological paradigms in fields such as economics, which came to esteem mastery of mathematics over an understanding of how banking actually works, with the consequences that we now have to endure. The most intriguing idea, however, is to use Kuhn's thinking to interpret his own achievement. In his quiet way, he brought about a conceptual revolution by triggering a shift in our understanding of science from a Whiggish paradigm to a Kuhnian one, and much of what is now done in the history and philosophy of science might be regarded as "normal" science within the new paradigm. But already the anomalies are beginning to accumulate. Kuhn, like Popper, thought that science was mainly about theory, but an increasing amount of cutting-edge scientific research is data- rather than theory-driven. And while physics was undoubtedly the Queen of the Sciences when Structure… was being written, that role has now passed to molecular genetics and biotechnology. Does Kuhn's analysis hold good for these new areas of science? And if not, isn't it time for a paradigm shift? In the meantime, if you're making a list of books to read before you die, Kuhn's masterwork is one.
7992	dbpedia	2	2	https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/	en	Thomas Kuhn (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)			[ "https://plato.stanford.edu/symbols/sep-man-red.png", "https://plato.stanford.edu/symbols/sepman-icon.jpg", "https://plato.stanford.edu/symbols/sepman-icon.jpg", "https://plato.stanford.edu/symbols/inpho.png", "https://plato.stanford.edu/symbols/pp.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null	1. Life and Career Thomas Kuhn’s academic life started in physics. He then switched to history of science, and as his career developed he moved over to philosophy of science, although retaining a strong interest in the history of physics. In 1943, he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude. Thereafter he spent the remainder of the war years in research related to radar at Harvard and then in Europe. He gained his master’s degree in physics in 1946, and his doctorate in 1949, also in physics (concerning an application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics). Kuhn was elected to the prestigious Society of Fellows at Harvard, another of whose members was W. V. Quine. At this time, and until 1956, Kuhn taught a class in science for undergraduates in the humanities, as part of the General Education in Science curriculum, developed by James B. Conant, the President of Harvard. This course was centred around historical case studies, and this was Kuhn’s first opportunity to study historical scientific texts in detail. His initial bewilderment on reading the scientific work of Aristotle was a formative experience, followed as it was by a more or less sudden ability to understand Aristotle properly, undistorted by knowledge of subsequent science. This led Kuhn to concentrate on history of science and in due course he was appointed to an assistant professorship in general education and the history of science. During this period his work focussed on eighteenth century matter theory and the early history of thermodynamics. Kuhn then turned to the history of astronomy, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution. In 1961 Kuhn became a full professor at the University of California at Berkeley, having moved there in 1956 to take up a post in history of science, but in the philosophy department. This enabled him to develop his interest in the philosophy of science. At Berkeley Kuhn’s colleagues included Stanley Cavell, who introduced Kuhn to the works of Wittgenstein, and Paul Feyerabend. With Feyerabend Kuhn discussed a draft of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which was published in 1962 in the series “International Encyclopedia of Unified Science”, edited by Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. The central idea of this extraordinarily influential—and controversial—book is that the development of science is driven, in normal periods of science, by adherence to what Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’. The functions of a paradigm are to supply puzzles for scientists to solve and to provide the tools for their solution. A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’. Crisis is followed by a scientific revolution if the existing paradigm is superseded by a rival. Kuhn claimed that science guided by one paradigm would be ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a different paradigm, by which is meant that there is no common measure for assessing the different scientific theories. This thesis of incommensurability, developed at the same time by Feyerabend, rules out certain kinds of comparison of the two theories and consequently rejects some traditional views of scientific development, such as the view that later science builds on the knowledge contained within earlier theories, or the view that later theories are closer approximations to the truth than earlier theories. Most of Kuhn’s subsequent work in philosophy was spent in articulating and developing the ideas in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, although some of these, such as the thesis of incommensurability, underwent transformation in the process. According to Kuhn himself (2000, 307), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions first aroused interest among social scientists, although it did in due course create the interest among philosophers that Kuhn had intended (and also before long among a much wider academic and general audience). While acknowledging the importance of Kuhn’s ideas, the philosophical reception was nonetheless hostile. For example, Dudley Shapere’s review (1964) emphasized the relativist implications of Kuhn’s ideas, and this set the context for much subsequent philosophical discussion. Since the following of rules (of logic, of scientific method, etc.) was regarded as the sine qua non of rationality, Kuhn’s claim that scientists do not employ rules in reaching their decisions appeared tantamount to the claim that science is irrational. This was highlighted by his rejection of the distinction between discovery and justification (denying that we can distinguish between the psychological process of thinking up an idea and the logical process of justifying its claim to truth) and his emphasis on incommensurability (the claim that certain kinds of comparison between theories are impossible). The negative response among philosophers was exacerbated by an important naturalistic tendency in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that was then unfamiliar. A particularly significant instance of this was Kuhn’s insistence on the importance of the history of science for philosophy of science. The opening sentence of the book reads: “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed” (1962/1970, 1). Also significant and unfamiliar was Kuhn’s appeal to psychological literature and examples (such as linking theory-change with the changing appearance of a Gestalt image). In 1964 Kuhn left Berkeley to take up the position of M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. In the following year an important event took place which helped promote Kuhn’s profile further among philosophers. An International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science was held at Bedford College, London. One of the key events of the Colloquium was intended to be a debate between Kuhn and Feyerabend, with Feyerabend promoting the critical rationalism that he shared with Popper. As it was, Feyerabend was ill and unable to attend, and the papers delivered focussed on Kuhn’s work. John Watkins took Feyerabend’s place in a session chaired by Popper. The ensuing discussion, to which Popper and also Margaret Masterman and Stephen Toulmin contributed, compared and contrasted the viewpoints of Kuhn and Popper and thereby helped illuminate the significance of Kuhn’s approach. Papers from these discussants along with contributions from Feyerabend and Lakatos, were published several years later, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970) (the fourth volume of proceedings from this Colloquium). In the same year the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published, including an important postscript in which Kuhn clarified his notion of paradigm. This was in part in response to Masterman’s (1970) criticism that Kuhn had used ‘paradigm’ in a wide variety of ways; in addition, Kuhn felt that critics had failed to appreciate the emphasis he placed upon the idea of a paradigm as an exemplar or model of puzzle-solving. Kuhn also, for the first time, explicitly gave his work an anti-realist element by denying the coherence of the idea that theories could be regarded as more or less close to the truth. A collection of Kuhn’s essays in the philosophy and history of science was published in 1977, with the title The Essential Tension taken from one of Kuhn’s earliest essays in which he emphasizes the importance of tradition in science. The following year saw the publication of his second historical monograph Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, concerning the early history of quantum mechanics. In 1983 he was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Kuhn continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s to work on a variety of topics in both history and philosophy of science, including the development of the concept of incommensurability, and at the time of his death in 1996 he was working on a second philosophical monograph dealing with, among other matters, an evolutionary conception of scientific change and concept acquisition in developmental psychology. 2. The Development of Science In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn paints a picture of the development of science quite unlike any that had gone before. Indeed, before Kuhn, there was little by way of a carefully considered, theoretically explained account of scientific change. Instead, there was a conception of how science ought to develop that was a by-product of the prevailing philosophy of science, as well as a popular, heroic view of scientific progress. According to such opinions, science develops by the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors. Such progress might accelerate in the hands of a particularly great scientist, but progress itself is guaranteed by the scientific method. In the 1950s, when Kuhn began his historical studies of science, the history of science was a young academic discipline. Even so, it was becoming clear that scientific change was not always as straightforward as the standard, traditional view would have it. Kuhn was the first and most important author to articulate a developed alternative account. Since the standard view dovetailed with the dominant, positivist-influenced philosophy of science, a non-standard view would have important consequences for the philosophy of science. Kuhn had little formal philosophical training but was nonetheless fully conscious of the significance of his innovation for philosophy, and indeed he called his work ‘history for philosophical purposes’ (Kuhn 2000, 276). According to Kuhn the development of a science is not uniform but has alternating ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ (or ‘extraordinary’) phases. The revolutionary phases are not merely periods of accelerated progress, but differ qualitatively from normal science. Normal science does resemble the standard cumulative picture of scientific progress, on the surface at least. Kuhn describes normal science as ‘puzzle-solving’ (1962/1970a, 35–42). While this term suggests that normal science is not dramatic, its main purpose is to convey the idea that like someone doing a crossword puzzle or a chess problem or a jigsaw, the puzzle-solver expects to have a reasonable chance of solving the puzzle, that his doing so will depend mainly on his own ability, and that the puzzle itself and its methods of solution will have a high degree of familiarity. A puzzle-solver is not entering completely uncharted territory. Because its puzzles and their solutions are familiar and relatively straightforward, normal science can expect to accumulate a growing stock of puzzle-solutions. Revolutionary science, however, is not cumulative in that, according to Kuhn, scientific revolutions involve a revision to existing scientific belief or practice (1962/1970a, 92). Not all the achievements of the preceding period of normal science are preserved in a revolution, and indeed a later period of science may find itself without an explanation for a phenomenon that in an earlier period was held to be successfully explained. This feature of scientific revolutions has become known as ‘Kuhn-loss’ (1962/1970a, 99–100). If, as in the standard picture, scientific revolutions are like normal science but better, then revolutionary science will at all times be regarded as something positive, to be sought, promoted, and welcomed. Revolutions are to be sought on Popper’s view also, but not because they add to positive knowledge of the truth of theories but because they add to the negative knowledge that the relevant theories are false. Kuhn rejected both the traditional and Popperian views in this regard. He claims that normal science can succeed in making progress only if there is a strong commitment by the relevant scientific community to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments and techniques, and even metaphysics. This constellation of shared commitments Kuhn at one point calls a ‘disciplinary matrix’ (1970a, 182) although elsewhere he often uses the term ‘paradigm’. Because commitment to the disciplinary matrix is a pre-requisite for successful normal science, an inculcation of that commitment is a key element in scientific training and in the formation of the mind-set of a successful scientist. This tension between the desire for innovation and the necessary conservativeness of most scientists was the subject of one of Kuhn’s first essays in the theory of science, “The Essential Tension” (1959). The unusual emphasis on a conservative attitude distinguishes Kuhn not only from the heroic element of the standard picture but also from Popper and his depiction of the scientist forever attempting to refute her most important theories. This conservative resistance to the attempted refutation of key theories means that revolutions are not sought except under extreme circumstances. Popper’s philosophy requires that a single reproducible, anomalous phenomenon be enough to result in the rejection of a theory (Popper 1959, 86–7). Kuhn’s view is that during normal science scientists neither test nor seek to confirm the guiding theories of their disciplinary matrix. Nor do they regard anomalous results as falsifying those theories. (It is only speculative puzzle-solutions that can be falsified in a Popperian fashion during normal science (1970b, 19).) Rather, anomalies are ignored or explained away if at all possible. It is only the accumulation of particularly troublesome anomalies that poses a serious problem for the existing disciplinary matrix. A particularly troublesome anomaly is one that undermines the practice of normal science. For example, an anomaly might reveal inadequacies in some commonly used piece of equipment, perhaps by casting doubt on the underlying theory. If much of normal science relies upon this piece of equipment, normal science will find it difficult to continue with confidence until this anomaly is addressed. A widespread failure in such confidence Kuhn calls a ‘crisis’ (1962/1970a, 66–76). The most interesting response to crisis will be the search for a revised disciplinary matrix, a revision that will allow for the elimination of at least the most pressing anomalies and optimally the solution of many outstanding, unsolved puzzles. Such a revision will be a scientific revolution. According to Popper the revolutionary overthrow of a theory is one that is logically required by an anomaly. According to Kuhn however, there are no rules for deciding the significance of a puzzle and for weighing puzzles and their solutions against one another. The decision to opt for a revision of a disciplinary matrix is not one that is rationally compelled; nor is the particular choice of revision rationally compelled. For this reason the revolutionary phase is particularly open to competition among differing ideas and rational disagreement about their relative merits. Kuhn does briefly mention that extra-scientific factors might help decide the outcome of a scientific revolution—the nationalities and personalities of leading protagonists, for example (1962/1970a, 152–3). This suggestion grew in the hands of some sociologists and historians of science into the thesis that the outcome of a scientific revolution, indeed of any step in the development of science, is always determined by socio-political factors. Kuhn himself repudiated such ideas and his work makes it clear that the factors determining the outcome of a scientific dispute, particularly in modern science, are almost always to be found within science, specifically in connexion with the puzzle-solving power of the competing ideas. Kuhn states that science does progress, even through revolutions (1962/1970a, 160ff). The phenomenon of Kuhn-loss does, in Kuhn’s view, rule out the traditional cumulative picture of progress. The revolutionary search for a replacement paradigm is driven by the failure of the existing paradigm to solve certain important anomalies. Any replacement paradigm had better solve the majority of those puzzles, or it will not be worth adopting in place of the existing paradigm. At the same time, even if there is some Kuhn-loss, a worthy replacement must also retain much of the problem-solving power of its predecessor (1962/1970a, 169). (Kuhn does clarify the point by asserting that the newer theory must retain pretty well all its predecessor’s power to solve quantitative problems. It may however lose some qualitative, explanatory power [1970b, 20].) Hence we can say that revolutions do bring with them an overall increase in puzzle-solving power, the number and significance of the puzzles and anomalies solved by the revised paradigm exceeding the number and significance of the puzzles-solutions that are no longer available as a result of Kuhn-loss. Kuhn is quick to deny that there is any inference from such increases to improved nearness to the truth ((1962/1970a, 170–1). Indeed he later denies that any sense can be made of the notion of nearness to the truth (1970a, 206). Rejecting a teleological view of science progressing towards the truth, Kuhn favours an evolutionary view of scientific progress (1962/1970a, 170–3), discussed in detail by Wray (2011) (see also Bird 2000 and Renzi 2009). The evolutionary development of an organism might be seen as its response to a challenge set by its environment. But that does not imply that there is some ideal form of the organism that it is evolving towards. Analogously, science improves by allowing its theories to evolve in response to puzzles and progress is measured by its success in solving those puzzles; it is not measured by its progress towards to an ideal true theory. While evolution does not lead towards ideal organisms, it does lead to greater diversity of kinds of organism. As Wray explains, this is the basis of a Kuhnian account of specialization in science, an account that Kuhn was developing particularly in the latter part of his career. According to this account, the revolutionary new theory that succeeds in replacing another that is subject to crisis, may fail to satisfy all the needs of those working with the earlier theory. One response to this might be for the field to develop two theories, with domains restricted relative to the original theory (one might be the old theory or a version of it). This formation of new specialties will also bring with it new taxonomic structures and so leads to incommensurability. 3. The Concept of a Paradigm A mature science, according to Kuhn, experiences alternating phases of normal science and revolutions. In normal science the key theories, instruments, values and metaphysical assumptions that comprise the disciplinary matrix are kept fixed, permitting the cumulative generation of puzzle-solutions, whereas in a scientific revolution the disciplinary matrix undergoes revision, in order to permit the solution of the more serious anomalous puzzles that disturbed the preceding period of normal science. A particularly important part of Kuhn’s thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions focuses upon one specific component of the disciplinary matrix. This is the consensus on exemplary instances of scientific research. These exemplars of good science are what Kuhn refers to when he uses the term ‘paradigm’ in a narrower sense. He cites Aristotle’s analysis of motion, Ptolemy’s computations of plantery positions, Lavoisier’s application of the balance, and Maxwell’s mathematization of the electromagnetic field as paradigms (1962/1970a, 23). Exemplary instances of science are typically to be found in books and papers, and so Kuhn often also describes great texts as paradigms—Ptolemy’s Almagest, Lavoisier’s Traité élémentaire de chimie, and Newton’s Principia Mathematica and Opticks (1962/1970a, 12). Such texts contain not only the key theories and laws, but also—and this is what makes them paradigms—the applications of those theories in the solution of important problems, along with the new experimental or mathematical techniques (such as the chemical balance in Traité élémentaire de chimie and the calculus in Principia Mathematica) employed in those applications. In the postscript to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn says of paradigms in this sense that they are “the most novel and least understood aspect of this book” (1962/1970a, 187). The claim that the consensus of a disciplinary matrix is primarily agreement on paradigms-as-exemplars is intended to explain the nature of normal science and the process of crisis, revolution, and renewal of normal science. It also explains the birth of a mature science. Kuhn describes an immature science, in what he sometimes calls its ‘pre-paradigm’ period, as lacking consensus. Competing schools of thought possess differing procedures, theories, even metaphysical presuppositions. Consequently there is little opportunity for collective progress. Even localized progress by a particular school is made difficult, since much intellectual energy is put into arguing over the fundamentals with other schools instead of developing a research tradition. However, progress is not impossible, and one school may make a breakthrough whereby the shared problems of the competing schools are solved in a particularly impressive fashion. This success draws away adherents from the other schools, and a widespread consensus is formed around the new puzzle-solutions. This widespread consensus now permits agreement on fundamentals. For a problem-solution will embody particular theories, procedures and instrumentation, scientific language, metaphysics, and so forth. Consensus on the puzzle-solution will thus bring consensus on these other aspects of a disciplinary matrix also. The successful puzzle-solution, now a paradigm puzzle-solution, will not solve all problems. Indeed, it will probably raise new puzzles. For example, the theories it employs may involve a constant whose value is not known with precision; the paradigm puzzle-solution may employ approximations that could be improved; it may suggest other puzzles of the same kind; it may suggest new areas for investigation. Generating new puzzles is one thing that the paradigm puzzle-solution does; helping solve them is another. In the most favourable scenario, the new puzzles raised by the paradigm puzzle-solution can be addressed and answered using precisely the techniques that the paradigm puzzle-solution employs. And since the paradigm puzzle-solution is accepted as a great achievement, these very similar puzzle-solutions will be accepted as successful solutions also. This is why Kuhn uses the terms ‘exemplar’ and ‘paradigm’. For the novel puzzle-solution which crystallizes consensus is regarded and used as a model of exemplary science. In the research tradition it inaugurates, a paradigm-as-exemplar fulfils three functions: (i) it suggests new puzzles; (ii) it suggests approaches to solving those puzzles; (iii) it is the standard by which the quality of a proposed puzzle-solution can be measured (1962/1970a, 38–9). In each case it is similarity to the exemplar that is the scientists’ guide. That normal science proceeds on the basis of perceived similarity to exemplars is an important and distinctive feature of Kuhn’s new picture of scientific development. The standard view explained the cumulative addition of new knowledge in terms of the application of the scientific method. Allegedly, the scientific method encapsulates the rules of scientific rationality. It may be that those rules could not account for the creative side of science—the generation of new hypotheses. The latter was thus designated ‘the context of discovery’, leaving the rules of rationality to decide in the ‘context of justification’ whether a new hypothesis should, in the light of the evidence, be added to the stock of accepted theories. Kuhn rejected the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification (1962/1970a, 8), and correspondingly rejected the standard account of each. As regards the context of discovery, the standard view held that the philosophy of science had nothing to say on the issue of the functioning of the creative imagination. But Kuhn’s paradigms do provide a partial explanation, since training with exemplars enables scientists to see new puzzle-situations in terms of familiar puzzles and hence enables them to see potential solutions to their new puzzles. More important for Kuhn was the way his account of the context of justification diverged from the standard picture. The functioning of exemplars is intended explicitly to contrast with the operation of rules. The key determinant in the acceptability of a proposed puzzle-solution is its similarity to the paradigmatic puzzle-solutions. Perception of similarity cannot be reduced to rules, and a fortiori cannot be reduced to rules of rationality. This rejection of rules of rationality was one of the factors that led Kuhn’s critics to accuse him of irrationalism—regarding science as irrational. In this respect at least the accusation is wide of the mark. For to deny that some cognitive process is the outcome of applying rules of rationality is not to imply that it is an irrational process: the perception of similarity in appearance between two members of the same family also cannot be reduced to the application of rules of rationality. Kuhn’s innovation in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was to suggest that a key element in cognition in science operates in the same fashion. 4. Incommensurability and World-Change The standard empiricist conception of theory evaluation regards our judgment of the epistemic quality of a theory to be a matter of applying rules of method to the theory and the evidence. Kuhn’s contrasting view is that we judge the quality of a theory (and its treatment of the evidence) by comparing it to a paradigmatic theory. The standards of assessment therefore are not permanent, theory-independent rules. They are not rules, because they involve perceived relations of similarity (of puzzle-solution to a paradigm). They are not theory-independent, since they involve comparison to a (paradigm) theory. They are not permanent, since the paradigm may change in a scientific revolution. For example, to many in the seventeenth century, Newton’s account of gravitation, involving action at a distance with no underlying explanation, seemed a poor account, in that respect at least, when compared, for example, to Ptolemy’s explanation of the motion of the planets in terms of contiguous crystalline spheres or to Descartes’ explanation in terms of vortices. However, later, once Newton’s theory had become accepted and the paradigm by which later theories were judged, the lack of an underlying mechanism for a fundamental force was regarded as no objection, as, for example, in the case of Coulomb’s law of electrostatic attraction. Indeed, in the latter case the very similarity of Coulomb’s equation to Newton’s was taken to be in its favour. Consequently, comparison between theories will not be as straightforward as the standard empiricist picture would have it, since the standards of evaluation are themselves subject to change. This sort of difficulty in theory comparison is an instance of what Kuhn and Feyerabend called ‘incommensurability’. Theories are incommensurable when they share no common measure. Thus, if paradigms are the measures of attempted puzzle-solutions, then puzzle-solutions developed in different eras of normal science will be judged by comparison to differing paradigms and so lack a common measure. The term ‘incommensurable’ derives from a mathematical use, according to which the side and diagonal of a square are incommensurable in virtue of there being no unit that can be used to measure both exactly. Kuhn stressed that incommensurability did not mean non-comparability (just as the side and diagonal of a square are comparable in many respects). Even so, it is clear that at the very least Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis would make theory comparison rather more difficult than had commonly been supposed, and in some cases impossible. We can distinguish three types of incommensurability in Kuhn’s remarks: (1) methodological—there is no common measure because the methods of comparison and evaluation change; (2) perceptual/observational—observational evidence cannot provide a common basis for theory comparison, since perceptual experience is theory-dependent; (3) semantic—the fact that the languages of theories from different periods of normal science may not be inter-translatable presents an obstacle to the comparison of those theories. (See Sankey 1993 for a useful discussion of Kuhn’s changing accounts of incommensurability.) 4.1 Methodological Incommensurability The incommensurability illustrated above whereby puzzle-solutions from different eras of normal science are evaluated by reference to different paradigms, is methodological incommensurability. Another source of methodological incommensurability is the fact that proponents of competing paradigms may not agree on which problems a candidate paradigm should solve (1962/1970a, 148). In general the factors that determine our choices of theory (whether puzzle-solutions or potential paradigm theories) are not fixed and neutral but vary and are dependent in particular on the disciplinary matrix within which the scientist is working. Indeed, since decision making is not rule-governed or algorithmic, there is no guarantee that those working within the same disciplinary matrix must agree on their evaluation of theory (1962/1970a, 200), although in such cases the room for divergence will be less than when the disputants operate within different disciplinary matrices. Despite the possibility of divergence, there is nonetheless widespread agreement on the desirable features of a new puzzle-solution or theory. Kuhn (1977, 321–2) identifies five characteristics that provide the shared basis for a choice of theory: 1. accuracy; 2. consistency (both internal and with other relevant currently accepted theories); 3. scope (its consequences should extend beyond the data it is required to explain); 4. simplicity (organizing otherwise confused and isolated phenomena); 5. fruitfulness (for further research). Even though these are, for Kuhn, constitutive of science (1977c, 331; 1993, 338) they cannot determine scientific choice. First, which features of a theory satisfy these criteria may be disputable (e.g. does simplicity concern the ontological commitments of a theory or its mathematical form?). Secondly, these criteria are imprecise, and so there is room for disagreement about the degree to which they hold. Thirdly, there can be disagreement about how they are to be weighted relative to one another, especially when they conflict. 4.2 Perception, Observational Incommensurability, and World-Change An important focus of Kuhn’s interest in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was on the nature of perception and how it may be that what a scientist observes can change as a result of scientific revolution. He developed what has become known as the thesis of the theory-dependence of observation, building on the work of N. R. Hanson (1958) while also referring to psychological studies carried out by his Harvard colleagues, Leo Postman and Jerome Bruner (Bruner and Postman 1949). The standard positivist view was that observation provides the neutral arbiter between competing theories. The thesis that Kuhn and Hanson promoted denied this, holding that the nature of observation may be influenced by prior beliefs and experiences. Consequently it cannot be expected that two scientists when observing the same scene will make the same theory-neutral observations. Kuhn asserts that Galileo and an Aristotelian when both looking at a pendulum will see different things (see quoted passage below). The theory-dependence of observation, by rejecting the role of observation as a theory-neutral arbiter among theories, provides another source of incommensurability. Methodological incommensurability (§4.1 above) denies that there are universal methods for making inferences from the data. The theory-dependence of observation means that even if there were agreed methods of inference and interpretation, incommensurability could still arise since scientists might disagree on the nature of the observational data themselves. Kuhn expresses or builds on the idea that participants in different disciplinary matrices will see the world differently by claiming that their worlds are different: In a sense I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction (1962/1970a, 150). Remarks such as these gave some commentators the impression that Kuhn was a strong kind of constructivist, holding that the way the world literally is depends on which scientific theory is currently accepted. Kuhn, however, denied any constructivist import to his remarks on world-change. (The closest Kuhn came to constructivism was to acknowledge a parallel with Kantian idealism, which is discussed below in Section 6.4.) Kuhn likened the change in the phenomenal world to the Gestalt-switch that occurs when one sees the duck-rabbit diagram first as (representing) a duck then as (representing) a rabbit, although he himself acknowledged that he was not sure whether the Gestalt case was just an analogy or whether it illustrated some more general truth about the way the mind works that encompasses the scientific case too. 4.3 Kuhn’s Early Semantic Incommensurability Thesis Although the theory-dependence of observation plays a significant role in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, neither it nor methodological incommensurability could account for all the phenomena that Kuhn wanted to capture with the notion of incommensurability. Some of his own examples are rather stretched—for instance he says Lavoisier saw oxygen where Priestley saw dephlogisticated air, describing this as a ‘transformation of vision’ (1962/1970a, 118). Moreover observation—if conceived of as a form of perception—does not play a significant part in every science. Kuhn wanted to explain his own experience of reading Aristotle, which first left him with the impression that Aristotle was an inexplicably poor scientist (Kuhn 1987). But careful study led to a change in his understanding that allowed him to see that Aristotle was indeed an excellent scientist. This could not simply be a matter of literally perceiving things differently. Kuhn took the incommensurability that prevented him from properly understanding Aristotle to be at least partly a linguistic, semantic matter. Indeed, Kuhn spent much of his career after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions attempting to articulate a semantic conception of incommensurability. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn asserts that there are important shifts in the meanings of key terms as a consequence of a scientific revolution. For example, Kuhn says: … the physical referents of these Einsteinian concepts are by no means identical with those of the Newtonian concepts that bear the same name. (Newtonian mass is conserved; Einsteinian is convertible with energy. Only at low relative velocities may the two be measured in the same way, and even then they must not be conceived to be the same.) (1962/1970a, 102) This is important, because a standard conception of the transition from classical to relativistic physics is that although Einstein’s theory of relativity supersedes Newton’s theory, what we have is an improvement or generalization whereby Newton’s theory is a special case of Einstein’s (to a close approximation). We can therefore say that the later theory is closer to the truth than the older theory. Kuhn’s view that ‘mass’ as used by Newton cannot be translated by ‘mass’ as used by Einstein allegedly renders this kind of comparison impossible. Hence incommensurability is supposed to rule out convergent realism, the view that science shows ever improving approximation to the truth. (Kuhn also thinks, for independent reasons, that the very ideas of matching the truth and similarity to the truth are incoherent (1970a, 206).) Kuhn’s view as expressed in the passage quoted above depends upon meaning holism—the claim that the meanings of terms are interrelated in such a way that changing the meaning of one term results in changes in the meanings of related terms: “To make the transition to Einstein’s universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space, time, matter, force, and so on, had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole.” (1962/1970a, 149). The assumption of meaning holism is a long standing one in Kuhn’s work. One source for this is the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. Another not unrelated source is the assumption of holism in the philosophy of science that is consequent upon the positivist conception of theoretical meaning. According to the latter, it is not the function of the theoretical part of scientific language to refer to and describe unobserved entities. Only observational sentences directly describe the world, and this accounts for them having the meaning that they do. Theories permit the deduction of observational sentences. This is what gives theoretical expressions their meaning. Theoretical statements cannot, however, be reduced to observational ones. This is because, first, theoretical propositions are collectively involved in the deduction of observational statements, rather than singly. Secondly, theories generate dispositional statements (e.g. about the solubility of a substance, about how they would appear if observed under certain circumstances, etc.), and dispositional statements, being modal, are not equivalent to any truth-function of (non-modal) observation statements. Consequently, the meaning of a theoretical sentence is not equivalent to the meaning of any observational sentence or combination of observational sentences. The meaning of a theoretical term is a product of two factors: the relationship of the theory or theories of which it is a part to its observational consequences and the role that particular term plays within those theories. This is the double-language model of the language of science and was the standard picture of the relationship of a scientific theory to the world when Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s challenge to it lay not in rejecting the anti-realism implicit in the view that theories do not refer to the world but rather in undermining the assumption that the relationship of observation sentence to the world is unproblematic. By insisting on the theory-dependence of observation, Kuhn in effect argued that the holism of theoretical meaning is shared by apparently observational terms also, and for this reason the problem of incommensurability cannot be solved by recourse to theory-neutral observation sentences. (Although it is true that Kuhn uses the expression ‘physical referent’ in the passage quoted above, this should not be taken to mean an independently existing worldly entity. If that were the case, Kuhn would be committed to the worldly existence of both Newtonian mass and Einsteinian mass (which are nonetheless not the same). It is implausible that Kuhn intended to endorse such a view. A better interpretation is to understand Kuhn as taking reference, in this context, to be a relation between a term and a hypothetical rather than worldly entity. Reference of anything like the Fregean, worldly kind plays no part in Kuhn’s thinking. Again this may be seen as a reflection of the influence of one or other or both of the (later) Wittgensteinian downplaying of reference and of the positivist view that theories are not descriptions of the world but are in one way or another tools for the organization or prediction of observations.) 4.4 Kuhn’s Later Semantic Incommensurability Thesis Although Kuhn asserted a semantic incommensurability thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions he did not there articulate or argue for the thesis in detail. This he attempted in subsequent work, with the result that the nature of the thesis changed over time. The heart of the incommensurability thesis after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the idea that certain kinds of translation are impossible. Early on Kuhn drew a parallel with Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation (1970a, 202; 1970c, 268). According to the latter, if we are translating one language into another, there are inevitably a multitude of ways of providing a translation that is adequate to the behaviour of the speakers. None of the translations is the uniquely correct one, and in Quine’s view there is no such thing as the meaning of the words to be translated. It was nonetheless clear that Quine’s thesis was rather far from Kuhn’s thesis, indeed that they are incompatible. First, Kuhn thought that incommensurability was a matter of there being no fully adequate translation whereas Quine’s thesis involved the availability of multiple translations. Secondly, Kuhn does believe that the translated expressions do have a meaning, whereas Quine denies this. Thirdly, Kuhn later went on to say that unlike Quine he does not think that reference is inscrutable—it is just very difficult to recover (1976, 191). Subsequently, Kuhn developed the view that incommensurability arises from differences in classificatory schemes. This is taxonomic incommensurability. A field of science is governed by a taxonomy, which divides its subject matter into kinds. Associated with a taxonomy is a lexical network—a network of related terms. A significant scientific change will bring with it an alteration in the lexical network which in turn will lead to a re-alignment of the taxonomy of the field. The terms of the new and old taxonomies will not be inter-translatable. The problematic nature of translation arises from two assumptions. First, as we have seen, Kuhn assumes that meaning is (locally) holistic. A change in the meaning of one part of the lexical structure will result in a change to all its parts. This would rule out preservation of the translatability of taxonomies by redefining the changed part in terms of the unchanged part. Secondly, Kuhn adopts the ‘no-overlap’ principle which states that categories in a taxonomy must be hierarchically organised: if two categories have members in common then one must be fully included within the other; otherwise they are disjoint—they cannot simply overlap. This rules out the possibility of an all-encompassing taxonomy that incorporates both the original and the changed taxonomies. (Ian Hacking (1993) relates this to the world-change thesis: after a revolution the world of individuals remains as it was, but scientists now work in a world of new kinds.) Kuhn continued to develop his conceptual approach to incommensurability. At the time of his death he had made considerable progress on a book in which he related incommensurability to issues in developmental psychology and concept acquisition. 5. History of Science Kuhn’s historical work covered several topics in the history of physics and astronomy. During the 1950s his focus was primarily on the early theory of heat and the work of Sadi Carnot. However, his first book concerned the Copernican revolution in planetary astronomy (1957). This book grew out of the teaching he had done on James Conant’s General Education in Science curriculum at Harvard but also presaged some of the ideas of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In detailing the problems with the Ptolemaic system and Copernicus’ solution to them, Kuhn showed two things. First, he demonstrated that Aristotelian science was genuine science and that those working within that tradition, in particular those working on Ptolemaic astronomy, were engaged in an entirely reasonable and recognizably scientific project. Secondly, Kuhn showed that Copernicus was himself far more indebted to that tradition than had typically been recognized. Thus the popular view that Copernicus was a modern scientist who overthrew an unscientific and long-outmoded viewpoint is mistaken both by exaggerating the difference between Copernicus and the Ptolemaic astronomers and in underestimating the scientific credentials of work carried out before Copernicus. This mistaken view—a product of the distortion caused by our current state of knowledge—can be rectified only by seeing the activities of Copernicus and his predecessors in the light of the puzzles presented to them by tradition that they inevitably had to work with. While Kuhn does acknowledge the influence of causes outside science (such as a resurgence in Sun worship (1962/70a, 152–3)), he nonetheless emphasizes the fact that astronomers were responding primarily to problems raised within science. What appealed to them in Copernicus’ model was its ability to do away with ad hoc devices in Ptolemy’s system (such as the equant), to explain key phenomena in a pleasing fashion (the observed retrograde motion of the planets), and to explain away otherwise inexplicable coincidences in Ptolemy’s system (such as the alignment of the Sun and the centres of the epicycles of the inferior planets). In the 1960s Kuhn’s historical work turned toward the early history of quantum theory, culminating in his book Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity. According to classical physics a particle could possess any energy in a continuous range and if it changes energy it does so in a continuous fashion, possessing at some point in time every energy between the initial and final energy states. Modern quantum theory denies both these classical principles. Energy is quantised—a particle may possess only one of a set of discrete energies. Consequently if it changes in energy from one value to the next permitted value it does so discontinuously, jumping straight from one energy to the other without taking any of the intermediate (‘forbidden’) values. In order to explain the distribution of energy within a cavity (black-body radiation), Planck used the device of dividing up the energy states into multiples of the unit or ‘quantum’ hν (where ν is the frequency of radiation and h is what subsequently became known as Planck’s constant). Planck did this in order to employ a statistical technique of Boltzmann’s whereby the range of possible continuous energies is divided into ‘cells’ of similar energies that could be treated together for mathematical purposes. Kuhn notes that Planck was puzzled that in carrying out his derivation, only by fixing the cell size at hν could he get the result he wanted—the technique should have worked for any way of dividing the cells, so long as they were small enough but not too small. This work of Planck’s was carried out in the period 1900–1, which is the date tradition has accorded to the invention of the quantum concept. However, argued Kuhn, Planck did not have in mind a genuine physical discontinuity of energies until 1908, which is after Albert Einstein and Paul Ehrenfest had themselves emphasized it in 1905–6. Many readers were surprised not to find mention of paradigms or incommensurability. Kuhn later added an Afterword, “Revisiting Planck”, explaining that he had not repudiated or ignored those ideas but that they were implicit in the argument he gave. Indeed the whole essay may be seen as a demonstration of an incommensurability between the mature quantum theory and the early quantum theory of Planck which was still rooted in classical statistical physics. In particular the very term ‘quantum’ changed its meaning between its introduction by Planck and its later use. Kuhn argues that the modern quantum concept was introduced first not by Planck but by Einstein. Furthermore, this fact is hidden both by the continued use of the same term and by the same distortion of history that has affected our conception of Ptolemy and Copernicus. As in Copernicus’ case, Planck has been seen as more revolutionary than in fact he was. In Planck’s case, however, this misconception was also shared by Planck himself later in life. 6. Criticism and Influence Kuhn’s work met with a largely critical reception among philosophers. Some of this criticism became muted as Kuhn’s work became better understood and as his own thinking underwent transformation. At the same time other developments in philosophy opened up new avenues for criticism. That criticism has largely focussed on two areas. First, it has been argued that Kuhn’s account of the development of science is not entirely accurate. Secondly, critics have attacked Kuhn’s notion of incommensurability, arguing that either it does not exist or, if it does exist, it is not a significant problem. Despite this criticism, Kuhn’s work has been hugely influential, both within philosophy and outside it. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was an important stimulus to what has since become known as ‘Science Studies’, in particular the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK). 6.1 Scientific Change In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions periods of normal science and revolutionary science are clearly distinguished. In particular paradigms and their theories are not questioned and not changed in normal science whereas they are questioned and are changed in revolutionary science. Thus a revolution is, by definition revisionary, and normal science is not (as regards paradigms). Furthermore, normal science does not suffer from the conceptual discontinuities that lead to incommensurability whereas revolutions do. This gives the impression, confirmed by Kuhn’s examples, that revolutions are particularly significant and reasonably rare episodes in the history of science. This picture has been questioned for its accuracy. Stephen Toulmin (1970) argues that a more realistic picture shows that revisionary changes in science are far more common and correspondingly less dramatic than Kuhn supposes, and that perfectly ‘normal’ science experiences these changes also. Kuhn could reply that such revisions are not revisions to the paradigm but to the non-paradigm puzzle-solutions provided by normal science. But that in turn requires a clear distinction between paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic components of science, a distinction that, arguably, Kuhn has not supplied in any detail. At the same time, by making revisionary change a necessary condition of revolutionary science, Kuhn ignores important discoveries and developments that are widely regarded as revolutionary, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA and the revolution in molecular biology. Kuhn’s view is that discoveries and revolutions come about only as a consequence of the appearance of anomalies. Yet it is also clear that a discovery might come about in the course of normal science and initiate a ‘revolution’ (in a non-Kuhnian sense) in a field because of the unexpected insight it provides and the way it opens up opportunities for new avenues of research. The double-helical structure of DNA was not expected but immediately suggested a mechanism for the duplication of genetic information (e.g. in mitosis), which had enormous consequences for subsequent biological research. 6.2 Incommensurability Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis presented a challenge not only to positivist conceptions of scientific change but also to realist ones. For a realist conception of scientific progress also wishes to assert that, by and large, later science improves on earlier science, in particular by approaching closer to the truth. A standard realist response from the late 1960s was to reject the anti-realism and anti-referentialism shared by both Kuhn’s picture and the preceding double-language model. If we do take theories to be potential descriptions of the world, involving reference to worldly entities, kind, and properties, then the problems raised by incommensurability largely evaporate. As we have seen, Kuhn thinks that we cannot properly say that Einstein’s theory is an improvement on Newton’s in the sense that the latter as deals reasonably accurately (only) with a special case of the former. Whether or not the key terms (such as ‘mass’) in the two theories differ in meaning, a realist and referentialist approach to theories permits one to say that Einstein’s theory is closer to the truth than Newton’s. For truth and nearness to the truth depend only on reference and not on sense. Two terms can differ in sense yet share the same reference, and correspondingly two sentences may relate to one another as regards truth without their sharing terms with the same sense. And so even if we retain a holism about the sense of theoretical terms and allow that revolutions lead to shifts in sense, there is no direct inference from this to a shift in reference. Consequently, there is no inference to the inadmissibility of the comparison of theories with respect to their truth-nearness. While this referentialist response to the incommensurability thesis was initially framed in Fregean terms (Scheffler 1967), it received further impetus from the work of Kripke (1980) and Putnam (1975b), which argued that reference could be achieved without anything akin to Fregean sense and that the natural kind terms of science exemplified this sense-free reference. In particular, causal theories of reference permit continuity of reference even through fairly radical theoretical change. (They do not guarantee continuity in reference, and changes in reference can occur on some causal theories, e.g. Gareth Evans’s (1973). Arguing that they do occur would require more, however, than merely pointing to a change in theory. Rather, it seems, cases of reference change must be identified and argued for on a case by case basis.) Therefore, if taken to encompass terms for quantities and properties (such as ‘mass’), the changes that Kuhn identified as changes in meaning (e.g. those involved in the shift from Newtonian to relativistic physics) would not necessarily be changes that bear on reference, nor, consequently, on comparison for nearness to the truth. The simple causal theory of reference does have its problems, such as explaining the referential mechanism of empty theoretical terms (e.g.caloric and phlogiston) (c.f. Enç 1976, Nola 1980). Causal-descriptive theories (which allow for a descriptive component) tackle such problems while retaining the key idea that referential continuity is possible despite radical theory change (Kroon 1985, Sankey 1994). Of course, the referentialist response shows only that reference can be retained, not that it must be. Consequently it is only a partial defence of realism against semantic incommensurability. A further component of the defence of realism against incommensurability must be an epistemic one. For referentialism shows that a term can retain reference and hence that the relevant theories may be such that the later constitutes a better approximation to the truth than the earlier. Nonetheless it may not be possible for philosophers or others to know that there has been such progress. Methodological incommensurability in particular seems to threaten the possibility of this knowledge. Kuhn thinks that in order to be in a position to compare theories from older and more recent periods of normal science one needs a perspective external to each and indeed any era of science–what he calls an ‘Archimedean platform’ (1992, 14). However, we never are able to escape from our current perspective. A realist response to this kind of incommensurability may appeal to externalist or naturalized epistemology. These (related) approaches reject the idea that for a method to yield knowledge it must be independent of any particular theory, perspective, or historical/cognitive circumstance. So long as the method has an appropriate kind of reliability it can generate knowledge. Contrary to the internalist view characteristic of the positivists (and, it appears, shared by Kuhn) the reliability of a method does not need to be one that must be evaluable independently of any particular scientific perspective. It is not the case, for example, that the reliability of a method used in science must be justifiable by a priori means. Thus the methods developed in one era may indeed generate knowledge, including knowledge that some previous era got certain matters wrong, or right but only to a certain degree. A naturalized epistemology may add that science itself is in the business of investigating and developing methods. As science develops we would expect its methods to change and develop also. 6.3 Kuhn and Social Science Kuhn’s influence outside of professional philosophy of science may have been even greater than it was within it. The social sciences in particular took up Kuhn with enthusiasm. There are primarily two reasons for this. First, Kuhn’s picture of science appeared to permit a more liberal conception of what science is than hitherto, one that could be taken to include disciplines such as sociology and psychoanalysis. Secondly, Kuhn’s rejection of rules as determining scientific outcomes appeared to permit appeal to other factors, external to science, in explaining why a scientific revolution took the course that it did. The status as genuine sciences of what we now call the social and human sciences has widely been held in doubt. Such disciplines lack the remarkable track record of established natural sciences and seem to differ also in the methods they employ. More specifically they fail by pre-Kuhnian philosophical criteria of sciencehood. On the one hand, positivists required of a science that it should be verifiable by reference to its predictive successes. On the other, Popper’s criterion was that a science should be potentially falsifiable by a prediction of the theory. Yet psychoanalysis, sociology and even economics have difficulty in making precise predictions at all, let alone ones that provide for clear confirmation or unambiguous refutation. Kuhn’s picture of a mature science as being dominated by a paradigm that generated sui generis puzzles and criteria for assessing solutions to them could much more easily accommodate these disciplines. For example, Popper famously complained that psychoanalysis could not be scientific because it resists falsification. Kuhn’s account argues that resisting falsification is precisely what every disciplinary matrix in science does. Even disciplines that could not claim to be dominated by a settled paradigm but were beset by competing schools with different fundamental ideas could appeal to Kuhn’s description of the pre-paradigm state of a science in its infancy. Consequently Kuhn’s analysis was popular among those seeking legitimacy as science (and consequently kudos and funding) for their new disciplines. Kuhn himself did not especially promote such extensions of his views, and indeed cast doubt upon them. He denied that psychoanalysis is a science and argued that there are reasons why some fields within the social sciences could not sustain extended periods of puzzle-solving normal science (1991b). Although, he says, the natural sciences involve interpretation just as human and social sciences do, one difference is that hermeneutic re-interpretation, the search for new and deeper intepretations, is the essence of many social scientific enterprises. This contrasts with the natural sciences where an established and unchanging interpretation (e.g. of the heavens) is a pre-condition of normal science. Re-intepretation is the result of a scientific revolution and is typically resisted rather than actively sought. Another reason why regular reinterpretation is part of the human sciences and not the natural sciences is that social and political systems are themselves changing in ways that call for new interpretations, whereas the subject matter of the natural sciences is constant in the relevant respects, permitting a puzzle-solving tradition as well as a standing source of revolution-generating anomalies. A rather different influence on social science was Kuhn’s influence on the development of social studies of science itself, in particular the ‘Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’. A central claim of Kuhn’s work is that scientists do not make their judgments as the result of consciously or unconsciously following rules. Their judgments are nonetheless tightly constrained during normal science by the example of the guiding paradigm. During a revolution they are released from these constraints (though not completely). Consequently there is a gap left for other factors to explain scientific judgments. Kuhn himself suggests in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that Sun worship may have made Kepler a Copernican and that in other cases, facts about an individual’s life history, personality or even nationality and reputation may play a role (1962/70a, 152–3). Later Kuhn repeated the point, with the additional examples of German Romanticism, which disposed certain scientists to recognize and accept energy conservation, and British social thought which enabled acceptance of Darwinism (1977c, 325). Such suggestions were taken up as providing an opportunity for a new kind of study of science, showing how social and political factors external to science influence the outcome of scientific debates. In what has become known as social constructivism/constructionism (e.g. Pickering 1984) this influence is taken to be central, not marginal, and to extend to the very content of accepted theories. Kuhn’s claim and its exploitation can be seen as analogous to or even an instance of the exploitation of the (alleged) underdetermination of theory by evidence (c.f. Kuhn 1992, 7). Feminists and social theorists (e.g. Nelson 1993) have argued that the fact that the evidence, or, in Kuhn’s case, the shared values of science, do not fix a single choice of theory, allows external factors to determine the final outcome (see Martin 1991 and Schiebinger 1999 for feminist social constructivism). Furthermore, the fact that Kuhn identified values as what guide judgment opens up the possibility that scientists ought to employ different values, as has been argued by feminist and post-colonial writers (e.g. Longino 1994). Kuhn himself, however, showed only limited sympathy for such developments. In his “The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science” (1992) Kuhn derides those who take the view that in the ‘negotiations’ that determine the accepted outcome of an experiment or its theoretical significance, all that counts are the interests and power relations among the participants. Kuhn targeted the proponents of the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge with such comments; and even if this is not entirely fair to the Strong Programme, it reflects Kuhn’s own view that the primary determinants of the outcome of a scientific episode are to be found within science. External history of science seeks causes of scientific change in social, political, religious and other developments of science. Kuhn sees his work as “pretty straight internalist” (2000: 287). First, the five values Kuhn ascribes to all science are in his view constitutive of science. An enterprise could have different values but it would not be science (1977c, 331; 1993, 338). Secondly, when a scientist is influenced by individual or other factors in applying these values or in coming to a judgment when these values are not decisive, those influencing factors will typically themselves come from within science (especially in modern, professionalized science). Personality may play a role in the acceptance of a theory, because, for example, one scientist is more risk-averse than another (1977c, 325)—but that is still a relationship to the scientific evidence. Even when reputation plays a part, it is typically scientific reputation that encourages the community to back the opinion of an eminent scientist. Thirdly, in a large community such variable factors will tend to cancel out. Kuhn supposes that individual differences are normally distributed and that a judgment corresponding to the mean of the distribution will also correspond to the judgment that would, hypothetically, be demanded by the rules of scientific method, as traditionally conceived (1977c, 333). Moreover, the existence of differences of response within the leeway provided by shared values is crucial to science, since it permits “rational men to disagree” (1977c, 332) and thus to commit themselves to rival theories. Thus the looseness of values and the differences they permit “may . . . appear an indispensable means of spreading the risk which the introduction or support of novelty always entails” (Ibid.). 6.4 Recent Developments Even if Kuhn’s work has not remained at the centre of the philosophy of science, a number of philosophers have continued to find it fruitful and have sought to develop it in a number of directions. Paul Hoyningen-Huene (1989/1993), as a result of working with Kuhn, developed an important neo-Kantian interpretation of his discussion of perception and world-change. We may distinguish between the world-in-itself and the ‘world’ of our perceptual and related experiences (the phenomenal world). This corresponds to the Kantian distinction between noumena and phenomena. The important difference between Kant and Kuhn is that Kuhn takes the general form of phenomena not to be fixed but changeable. A shift in paradigm can lead, via the theory-dependence of observation, to a difference in one’s experiences of things and thus to a change in one’s phenomenal world. This change in phenomenal world articulates the sense in which the world changes as a result of a scientific revolution while also capturing Kuhn’s claims about the theory-dependence of observation and consequent incommensurability (Hoyningen-Huene 1990). A rather different direction in which Kuhn’s thought has been developed proposes that his ideas might be illuminated by advances in cognitive psychology. One the one hand work on conceptual structures can help understand what might be correct in the incommensurability thesis (Nersessian 1987, 2003). Several authors have sought in different ways to emphasize what they take to be the Wittgensteinian element in Kuhn’s thought (for example Kindi 1995, Sharrock and Read 2002). Andersen, Barker, and Chen (1996, 1998, 2006) draw in particular on Kuhn’s version of Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance. Kuhn articulates a view according to which the extension of a concept is determined by similarity to a set of exemplary cases rather than by an intension. Andersen, Barker, and Chen argue that Kuhn’s view is supported by the work of Rosch (1972; Rosch and Mervis 1975) on prototypes; furthermore, this approach can be developed in the context of dynamic frames (Barsalou 1992), which can then explain the phenomenon of (semantic) incommensurability. On the other hand, the psychology of analogical thinking and cognitive habits may also inform our understanding of the concept of a paradigm. Kuhn himself tells us that “The paradigm as shared example is the central element of what I now take to be the most novel and least understood aspect of [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]” (1970a, 187). Kuhn, however, failed to develop the paradigm concept in his later work beyond an early application of its semantic aspects to the explanation of incommensurability. Nonetheless, other philosophers, principally Howard Margolis (1987, 1993) have developed the idea that habits of mind formed by training with paradigms-as-exemplars are an important component in understanding the nature of scientific development. As explained by Nickles (2003b) and Bird (2005), this is borne out by recent work by psychologists on model-based and analogical thinking. 6.5 Assessment Assessing Kuhn’s significance presents a conundrum. Unquestionably he was one of the most influential philosophers and historians of science of the twentieth century. His most obvious achievement was to have been a major force in bringing about the final demise of logical positivism. Nonetheless, there is no characteristically Kuhnian school that carries on his positive work. It is as if he himself brought about a revolution but did not supply the replacement paradigm. For a period in the 1960s and 1970s it looked as if there was a Kuhnian paradigm ‘historical philosophy of science’, flourishing especially in newly formed departments of history and philosophy of science. But as far as the history of science and science studies more generally are concerned, Kuhn repudiated at least the more radical developments made in his name. Indeed part of Kuhn’s fame must be due to the fact that both his supporters and his detractors took his work to be more revolutionary (anti-rationalist, relativist) than it really was. Turning to the philosophy of science, it was clear by the end of the 1980s that the centreground was now occupied by a new realism, one that took on board lessons from general philosophy of language and epistemology, in particular referentialist semantics and a belief in the possibility of objective knowledge and justification. There is some irony therefore in the fact that it was the demise of logical positivism/empiricism that led to the rebirth of scientific realism along with causal and externalist semantics and epistemology, positions that Kuhn rejected. One way of understanding this outcome is to see that Kuhn’s relationship on the one hand to positivism and on the other hand to realism places him in an interesting position. Kuhn’s thesis of the theory-dependence of observation parallels related claims by realists. In the hands of realists the thesis is taken to undermine the theory-observation dichotomy that permitted positivists to take an anti-realist attitude to theories. In the hands of Kuhn however, the thesis is taken, in effect, to extend anti-realism from theories to observation also. This in turn fuels the thesis of incommensurability. The fact that incommensurability is founded upon a response to positivism diametrically opposed to the realist response explains why much of Kuhn’s later philosophical work, which developed the incommensurability thesis, has had little impact on the majority of philosophers of science. The explanation of scientific development in terms of paradigms was not only novel but radical too, insofar as it gives a naturalistic explanation of belief-change. Naturalism was not in the early 1960s the familiar part of philosophical landscape that it has subsequently become. Kuhn’s explanation contrasted with explanations in terms of rules of method (or confirmation, falsification etc.) that most philosophers of science took to be constitutive of rationality. Furthermore, the relevant disciplines (psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence) were not then advanced enough to to support Kuhn’s contentions concerning paradigms, or those disciplines were antithetical to Kuhn’s views (in the case of classical AI). Now that naturalism has become an accepted component of philosophy, there has recently been interest in reassessing Kuhn’s work in the light of developments in the relevant sciences, many of which provide corroboration for Kuhn’s claim that science is driven by relations of perceived similarity and analogy. It may yet be that a characteristically Kuhnian thesis will play a prominent part in our understanding of science.
7992	dbpedia	0	11	https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn	en	Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia	https://simple.wikipedia.org/static/favicon/wikipedia.ico	https://simple.wikipedia.org/static/favicon/wikipedia.ico	[ "https://simple.wikipedia.org/static/images/icons/wikipedia.png", "https://simple.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-wordmark-en.svg", "https://simple.wikipedia.org/static/images/mobile/copyright/wikipedia-tagline-simple.svg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg/10px-OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a4/Flag_of_the_United_States.svg/30px-Flag_of_the_United_States.svg.png", "https://login.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAutoLogin/start?type=1x1", "https://simple.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/wikimedia-button.svg", "https://simple.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/poweredby_mediawiki.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Contributors to Wikimedia projects" ]	2013-06-19T07:15:26+00:00		en	/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png		https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn	Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 - 17 June, 1996) was a Jewish-American physicist, and historian and philosopher of science. He introduced the idea of paradigm shift. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and died from lung cancer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged 73. Incommensurability
7992	dbpedia	1	9	https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/historians-us-biographies/thomas-samuel-kuhn	en	Thomas Samuel Kuhn			[ "https://www.encyclopedia.com/themes/custom/trustme/images/header-logo.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "Get information", "facts", "and pictures", "about Thomas Samuel Kuhn", "at Encyclopedia.com", "Make", "research", "projects", "and school reports", "about Thomas Samuel Kuhn", "easy", "with credible", "articles", "from our FREE", "online encyclopedia and dictionary" ]	null	[]	null	KUHN, THOMAS SAMUEL(b. Cincinnati, Ohio, 18 July 1922; d.	en	/sites/default/files/favicon.ico		https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/historians-us-biographies/thomas-samuel-kuhn	KUHN, THOMAS SAMUEL (b. Cincinnati, Ohio, 18 July 1922; d. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 17 June 1996), philosophy of science, history of science, concept of paradigm. A physicist turned historian of science for philosophical purposes, Kuhn was one of the most influential philosophers of science in the twentieth century. In his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962, Kuhn helped destroy the popular image of science according to which science steadily and incrementally progresses toward a true and complete picture of reality. Relying on historical case studies, Kuhn argued that, ruptured by scientific revolutions, scientific development was discontinuous and noncumulative and that scientific activity before and after a revolution was in some ways incommensurable, lacking a common measure. In this way Kuhn not only formed a startling picture of science, but also initiated a new way of doing philosophy of science informed by the history of science. Life and Career . Thomas Kuhn was the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, who was trained as a hydraulic engineer at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Annette Stroock Kuhn. Both parents were nonpracticing Jews. Kuhn attended several schools in New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Among them, Hessian Hills in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, a progressive school that encouraged independent thinking, made a particularly strong impression on him. He then attended Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in physics in 1943. Despite the fact that his interest lay in theoretical physics, most of his coursework was in electronics, due to the orientation of his department. His professors included George Birkhoff, Percy W. Bridgman, Leon Chaffee, and Ronald W. P. King. He also took several elective courses in social sciences and humanities, including a philosophy course in which Immanuel Kant struck him as a revelation. He did not enjoy the history of science course that he attended, which was taught by the famous historian of science George Sarton. After graduation, he worked on radar for the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard and later for the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development in Europe. He returned to Harvard at the end of the war, obtained his master’s degree in physics in 1946, and worked toward a PhD degree in the same department. He also took a few philosophy courses in order to explore other possibilities than physics. It was about this time that the legendary president of Harvard University, the chemist and founder of “Harvard Case Studies in Experimental Science” James Conant, asked Kuhn to assist his course on science, designed for undergraduates in humanities as part of the General Education in Science Curriculum. This event changed Kuhn’s life. His encounter with classical texts, especially Aristotle’s Physics, was a crucial experience for him. He realized that it was a great mistake to read and judge an ancient scientific text from the perspective of current science and that one could not really understand it unless one got inside the mind of its author and saw the world through his eyes, through the conceptual framework he employed to describe phenomena. This understanding shaped his later historical and philosophical studies. In 1948 Kuhn became a junior member of the Harvard Society of Fellows upon Conant’s recommendation. A year later, he completed his PhD in physics under the supervision of John H. van Vleck, who won the Nobel Prize in 1977. Kuhn became an assistant professor of general education and the history of science in 1952 and taught at Harvard until 1956. During this period he trained himself as a historian of science, and Alexandre Koyré’s works, especially his Galilean Studies, had a deep impact on him. Between 1948 and 1956, Kuhn published three articles, one with van Vleck on computing cohesive energies of metals, derived from his PhD dissertation, and a number of historical works on Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Sadi Carnot’s cycle. He also wrote his first book, The Copernican Revolution, which was published in 1957. Nevertheless, Kuhn was denied tenure because the review committee thought that the book was too popular and not sufficiently scholarly. Feeling disappointed, Kuhn accepted a joint position as an assistant professor in the history and philosophy departments at the University of California, Berkeley. Soon after, he published his masterpiece, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It was also here that he met Paul Feyerabend, who introduced a version of the thesis of incommensurability at the same time Kuhn did. But the interaction was not fruitful. The person who influenced him most at Berkeley was Stanley Cavell. Cavell introduced him to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose view of meaning as use and idea of family resemblance had a lasting influence on Kuhn. He also heard Michael Polányi’s lectures on tacit knowledge, a notion that also found its way into his influential book. Between 1961 and 1964 he headed a project known as the “Sources for History of Quantum Physics,” which contained interviews with, and manuscript materials of, all the major scientists who contributed to the development of quantum physics. These materials are now part of the Archive for History of Quantum Physics. Kuhn was offered a full professorship at Berkeley in history, not in philosophy. Although disappointed, he accepted the offer. Not long after, however, he left Berkeley for the position of M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. He taught at Princeton from 1964 to 1979 and then, because of his divorce, he left Princeton and joined the philosophy department at MIT. In 1982 he was appointed to the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professorship in Philosophy, a position he held until 1991 when he retired. He became professor emeritus at MIT from then on until his death. He was survived by his second wife Jehane, his ex-wife Kathryn Muhs, and their three children. Thomas Kuhn received the Howard T. Behrman Award for distinguished achievements in the humanities (1977), the History of Science Society’s George Sarton Medal (1982), and the Society for Social Studies of Science’s John Desmond Bernal Award (1983). He was a Guggenheim Fellow during 1954 to 1955, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1972–1979), a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He also held honorary degrees from Columbia, Chicago, and Notre Dame universities in the United States, the University of Padua in Italy, and the University of Athens in Greece. He was the only person to have served as presidents of both the History of Science Society (1968–1970) and the Philosophy of Science Association (1988–1990). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Structure for short) opens with the sentence, “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed” (1970, p. 1). According to that image, science progresses toward truth in a linear fashion, each new theory incorporating the old one as a special case. Scientific progress is due to the scientific method, whereby theories are tested against observations and experiments; those that fail are disconfirmed or get eliminated and those that pass the tests are considered to be confirmed, or at least not yet falsified. This image was very popular among scientists, and in the philosophical world it was represented in various forms by logical positivists such as Rudolf Carnap, who emphasized confirmability and by Karl Popper, who emphasized falsifiability. Most logical positivists, though emphatically not Popper, also believed that observation provided neutral and secure grounds for the appraisal of scientific theories. It was generally agreed that scientific rationality and objectivity was a matter of compliance with the rules of scientific method, leaving little room for individual choices. Although Structure contained only one explicit reference to Popper and none to the logical positivists, clearly it targeted them, and together with the works of Norwood Hanson, Paul Feyerabend, and Stephen Toulmin, it destroyed the existing conception of science and scientific change. The main thesis of Kuhn’s book was that development in mature sciences typically goes through two consecutive phases: normal and revolutionary. Normal science is a paradigm-governed activity of puzzle solving. Based on settled consensus of the scientific community, normal scientific activity has little room for novelty that transcends the bounds of the paradigm. A paradigm provides a concrete model (called an “exemplar”) for solving problems it has set out. Kuhn called these problems “puzzles” because the paradigm assures the members of the scientific community that with sufficient skill and ingenuity they can be solved within its resources. Thus, in case of failure to solve a puzzle it is the individual scientist, not the paradigm, that is to be blamed. When, however, puzzles resist persistent attempts at solution, they turn into anomalies; and anomalies lead to a crisis when they accumulate. Crisis is marked by a loss of confidence in the paradigm and a search for an alternative one. Rival accounts proliferate, the most fundamental commitments about nature get questioned, and in the end, the scientific community embraces the most promising alternative as the new paradigm. A scientific revolution has occurred. Consequently, a new period of normal science begins, and a similar cycle of normal science–crisis–revolution follows. Whereas normal science is cumulative, revolutionary science is not. The new paradigm and the activity governed by it are in many ways incompatible with the old one. Kuhn expressed this point in terms of the thesis of incommensurability, which has several aspects. Both problems and the way they are solved change: there is a conceptual change, whereby certain terms acquire new meanings; because every observation is theory-laden, there is a perceptual change, a Gestalt switch, which causes the scientists to see the world differently; and, finally, there is even a sense in which the world itself changes after a revolution. For instance, according to Kuhn, the Aristotelian world contains swinging stones, but no pendulums. Accordingly, whereas the Aristotelian scientist sees constrained motion in a swinging stone, the Galilean-Newtonian scientist (who may as well be a transformed Aristotelian) literally sees a pendulum. In short, the new paradigm is incommensurable with the old one. Scientists working under rival paradigms often talk past each other and experience a breakdown in communication. The switch from one paradigm to another is very much like a conversion experience rather than a rational choice dictated mechanically by scientific methodology. Furthermore, much that has been accepted as true is discarded, making it impossible to say that the new paradigm brings us closer to truth. Not surprisingly, Structure sent shock waves through the philosophical community. Kuhn was accused of robbing science of its rationality and objectivity, turning it into a kind of mob psychology; he was charged with relativism, subjectivism, and outright idealism. Normal science was said to be dangerously dogmatic. The notion of “paradigm” was held to be too vague, lacking a definite meaning. In the “Postscript” to Structure, which was added to the second edition in 1970, and in several subsequent articles, most notably “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice,” collected in The Essential Tension, published in 1977, Kuhn defended himself against these charges, clarifying some of his earlier statements and retracting others. In this context the first thing he did was to clarify what he meant by “paradigm,” for which he now preferred the term “disciplinary matrix.” A disciplinary matrix consisted of four elements: metaphysical commitments; methodological commitments; criteria such as quantitative accuracy, broad scope, simplicity, consistency, and fruitfulness (which Kuhn called “values” since they are desired characteristics of scientific theories); and exemplars. The most important of these is exemplars, that is, concrete problem solutions that serve as models. Exemplars are always given in use; they guide research even in the absence of rules; and the study of exemplars enables scientists to acquire an ability to see family resemblances among seemingly unrelated problems. Much knowledge that is acquired in this way is tacit, inexpressible in propositions. Normal science is dogmatic to some degree, since it does not allow the questioning of the paradigm itself, but this sort of dogmatism is functional: it allows the scientists to further articulate their paradigmatic theory and pay undivided attention to the existing puzzles and anomalies, the recognition of which is a precondition for the emergence of novel theories and subsequently a revolution. In this way Kuhn dispelled the charges of vagueness and dogmatism. He also took pains to argue that incommensurability, the target of the greatest outrage, did not necessarily imply incomparability. Two paradigms, he said, often share enough common points to make it possible to compare them. For example, the astronomical data regarding the position of Mercury, Mars, and Venus were shared by both the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic and Copernican paradigms, and they both appealed to similar criteria (“values”). These commonalities provided sufficient grounds for paradigm comparison. Kuhn pointed out, however, that two scientists working under rival paradigms may share the same criteria but apply them differently to concrete cases. When they are confronted with a new puzzle, they may disagree, for instance, about whether paradigm A or B provides a simpler solution, or they may attach different weights to the shared criteria. This is a perfectly rational disagreement, and the only way to resolve it is through the techniques of persuasion. It is for this reason that paradigm choice often involves subjective, though not arbitrary, decisions. Rather than denying rationality, Kuhn developed a new conception of it. For him rationality is not just a matter of compliance with methodological rules. This is because the knowledge of how to apply a paradigm to a new puzzle is mostly learned not by being taught abstract rules but by being exposed to concrete exemplars. Yet this is a kind of tacit knowledge that is almost impossible to detach from the cases from which it was acquired. Thus, both paradigm choice and paradigm application often involve judgment and deliberation, a process akin to Aristotle’s phronesis; each scientist must use her lifelong experience, her “practical wisdom,” to make the best possible decision. In short, Kuhn urged a shift from a conception of rationality based on the mechanical application of determinate rules to a model of rationality that emphasizes the role of exemplars, deliberation, and judgment. Kuhn also argued that science does progress, but not toward truth in the sense of correspondence to an objective reality, because later theories are incommensurable with the earlier ones. Scientific progress for Kuhn simply meant increasing puzzle-solving ability: later theories are better than earlier ones in discovering and solving more and more puzzles. Appealing to the existence of shared criteria for paradigm comparison and to an instrumental idea of scientific progress, Kuhn tried to defend himself against the charge of relativism. The Linguistic Turn . In the 1980s and 1990s Kuhn wrote a number of articles, reformulating most of his philosophical views in terms of language, more specifically in terms of what he called taxonomic lexicons. These articles were published posthumously in the collection The Road since Structure (2000) and can be summarized as follows. First of all, having abandoned the terms disciplinary matrix as well as the much-used and -abused term paradigm in favor of theory, Kuhn now underlined the point that every scientific theory has its own distinctive structured taxonomic lexicon: a taxonomically ordered network of kind-terms, some of which are antecedently available relative to the theory in question. Second, lexicons are prerequisite to the formulation of scientific problems and their solutions, and descriptions of nature and its regularities. Hence, revolutions can be characterized as significant changes in the lexicons of scientific theories: both the criteria relevant to categorization and the way in which given objects and situations are distributed among preexisting categories are altered. Since different lexicons permit different descriptions and generalizations, revolutionary scientific development is necessarily discontinuous. Third, the distinction between normal and revolutionary science now becomes the distinction between activities that require changes in the scientific lexicon and those that do not. Revolutions involve, among other things, novel discoveries that cannot be described within the existing lexical network, so scientists feel forced to adopt a new one. The earlier mentalistic description (i.e., Gestalt switches and conversions) disappears from Kuhn’s writings. Finally, incommensurability is reduced to a sort of untranslatability, localized to one or another area in which two lexical structures differ. What gives rise to incommensurability is the difference between lexical structures. Because rival lexical structures differ radically, there are sentences of one theory that cannot be translated into the lexicon of the other theory without loss of meaning. All other aspects of incommensurability that were present in Structure drop out. Kuhn also gave a Kantian twist to these ideas. He argued that structured lexicons are constitutive of phenomenal worlds and possible experiences of them. In Kuhn’s view a taxonomic lexicon functions very much like the Kantian categories of the mind. This in turn led him not only to embrace a distinction between noumena and phenomena, but also to claim that fundamental laws, such as Newton’s second law, are synthetic a priori. The sense of a priori Kuhn had in mind is not “true for all times,” but something like “constitutive of objects of experience.” This is a historical or relativized a priori, like Hans Reichenbach’s. Taxonomic lexicons do vary historically, unlike Kantian categories. Even the second law is revisable despite the fact that it is recalcitrant to refutation by isolated experiments. Accordingly, Kuhn’s final position can be characterized as an evolutionary linguistic Kantianism. Using first principles, as it were, regarding the structure of taxonomic lexicons of scientific theories, and having a developmental perspective not simply derivative from the historical case studies, Kuhn’s linguistic turn enabled him to refine, add to, and unify his earlier views about scientific revolutions, incommensurability, and exemplars. He was also able to explain more clearly why incommensurability does not imply incomparability and why communication breakdown across a revolution is always partial. This is because incommensurability is a local, not global, phenomenon pertaining to a small subset of the scientific lexicon, and whatever communication breakdown exists can be overcome by becoming bilingual. Furthermore, he was finally able to articulate the sense in which the scientist’s world itself changes after a revolution. That sense is Kantian. Whereas the noumenal world is fixed, the phenomenal world constituted by a lexicon is not. Different lexicons “carve up,” as it were, different phenomenal worlds from the unique noumenal world, so Kuhn could now respond to the charge of idealism by pointing out that the noumenal world does exist independently of human minds, though it remains unknowable. History of Science . In the background of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is The Copernican Revolution, Kuhn’s first major contribution to the historiography of science. That book grew out of Kuhn’s science course for the humanities at Harvard in the 1950s and provided one of the key historical case studies that later enabled him to articulate his views about the development of science. The Copernican Revolution achieved several things at once. It showed above all that Nicolaus Copernicus was both a revolutionary and a conservative at the same time. Contrary to popular belief, the Copernican heliocentric system, with its rotating spheres, perfectly circular orbits, epicycles, and eccentricities, was in many ways a continuation of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic tradition of astronomy. But this conservativeness also meant that the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic tradition was a respectable scientific enterprise, having its own conceptual framework, problems, and ways of solving them. When looked at retrospectively, however, the Copernican system did pave the way, albeit unintentionally, for a revolution in science through the works of Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Newton. Kuhn argued forcefully in his book that aesthetic considerations played an important role in Copernicus’s placing the Sun at the center and thus turning Earth into an ordinary planet; the Ptolemaic system looked increasingly complicated, indeed “monstrous,” in the eyes of Copernicus. Although his model did not automatically yield simpler calculations, it provided qualitatively more coherent interpretations of certain phenomena, notably, the retrograde motion of planets. In addition to these, Kuhn drew attention to social factors behind the Copernican Revolution as well, such as the need for calendar reform, improved maps, and navigational techniques. Kuhn also pointed out the larger ramifications of the heliocentric system—in particular, how it changed the conception human beings had of their unique place in the universe and what sense that conception had for them. After The Copernican Revolution, Kuhn wrote a number of influential historical articles, including one on energy conservation as an example of simultaneous discovery, one on the difference between mathematical and experimental (dubbed as “Baconian”) traditions in the development of physical sciences, and another, with John Heilbron, on the genesis of the Bohr atom. Most of these are conveniently collected in his book The Essential Tension. Kuhn’s final major contribution to the historiography of science was his controversial book Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912, published in 1978. It constituted a break with a longstanding historio-graphical tradition and undermined the consensus between physicists and historians that quantum physics originated in the works of Max Planck in 1900. According to the traditional interpretation, Planck was forced to introduce the idea of energy quanta, thus breaking with classical physics. More sophisticated versions of this interpretation, which recognized that Planck himself did not understand the exact meaning of the energy quanta, were also defended in various forms by historians of science. In his book Kuhn argued that Planck did not abandon the framework of classical physics until after Hendrik Lorentz, Paul Ehrenfest, and Albert Einstein in 1905 attempted to understand his theory of blackbody radiation. Of the two historical books Kuhn wrote, the earlier one became a small classic of its own. Historians criticized the second one for exaggerating its case and ignoring certain developmental aspects of Planck’s works, and philosophers were surprised that it did not contain any references to “paradigms,” “normal science,” “incommensurability,” and the like. Kuhn defended himself in the second edition, arguing that many of the themes of Structure were there, though implicitly. Kuhn wore two hats, but never simultaneously. He saw the history and the philosophy of science as interrelated but separate disciplines with different aims. He believed that no one could practice them at the same time. As a philosopher, he said, he was interested in generalizations and analytical distinctions, but as a historian he was trying to construct a narrative that was coherent, comprehensible, and plausible. For this latter task, the historian had to pay attention first to the factors internal to science, such as ideas, concepts, problems, and theories, and to external factors like social, economic, political, and religious realities. In his historical works Kuhn focused primarily (but not exclusively) on the internal factors, but believed that although the internal and the external approaches were autonomous, they were complementary. He saw the unification of them as one of the greatest challenges facing the historian of science. Impact . Kuhn’s immense impact on the philosophy of science was exclusively through his works, since he did not supervise any PhD theses in this field. He did have, however, a number of PhD students in the history of science, including John Heilbron, Norton Wise, and Paul Forman, though Forman, in the end, completed his PhD thesis officially under Hunter Dupree. In historiography of science, Kuhn was a first-rate practitioner of the approach inaugurated by Alexandre Koyré, whom he admired deeply. Following Koyré, Kuhn believed that understanding a historical text necessarily involves a hermeneutical activity by which the historian interprets the text in its own terms and intellectual context. This means that the history of science should always be seen as part of the history of ideas, wherein the aim is to produce a maximally coherent interpretation. The historian is not someone who merely chronicles who discovered what and when. The projection of current conceptions onto past events is a cardinal sin often committed by the earlier positivistically inclined generations of historians of science, including Sarton. In the hands of Koyré, Kuhn, Rupert Hall, Bernard Cohen, Richard Westfall, and others, a new way of practicing historiography of science emerged. As a result, the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became the topic that played a decisive role in historiographical developments. Kuhn’s influence was incomparably greater in the field of philosophy. Structure was translated into some twenty languages and sold over a million copies. It is still indispensable reading not only in philosophy of science, but also in philosophy generally. More than any other text, it was responsible for the overthrow of logical positivism both as a source of a certain image of science and as a philosophical practice. After Structure, the field of philosophy of science took a historical turn in the 1970s and 1980s, using historical case studies either to ground or to test “empirically” a given view of the development of science. Kuhn’s views also led to the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge founded by Barry Barnes and David Bloor, who argued that the very content and nature of scientific knowledge can be explained sociologically and a fortiori naturalistically. Kuhn, however, distanced himself from the Strong Programme, characterizing it as a “deconstruction that has gone mad.” With its emphasis on the scientific community and its practices, Kuhn’s philosophy eventually gave rise to what is called social studies of science, a subspecialty that attempts to unify philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and ethnographic approaches into a coherent whole. The feminist critique of science, too, that has emerged since the 1980s owes much to Kuhn’s insights. Indeed, all of these studies are now routinely referred to as “post-Kuhnian.” Kuhn’s views had virtually no impact on the practice of science itself, but they did catch the attention of both physicists and social scientists. While the former group was largely critical, the latter group was mostly sympathetic. The interest of social scientists was to a great extent methodological: they wondered whether sociology, political science, and economics were “mature sciences” like physics and chemistry, governed by a single paradigm at a given period, and whether they conformed to the pattern of normal science–crisis–revolution–normal science. One noticeable effect of such studies was that physical sciences came to be seen as being as interpretive as social sciences were, and in that respect not so different from them. Were Kuhn’s ideas as revolutionary as they were widely taken to be? Recent historical studies on the origins and development of logical positivism indicate that there are as many similarities and continuities as there are differences and discontinuities between that movement and Kuhn’s views. Kuhn himself confessed later in life that he had fortunately very limited firsthand knowledge of logical positivist writings; otherwise, he said, he would have written a completely different book. But, as Alexander Bird put it, like Copernicus and Planck, Kuhn inaugurated a revolution that went far beyond what he himself imagined. BIBLIOGRAPHY WORKS BY KUHN “Robert Boyle and Structural Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century.” Isis 43 (1952): 12–36. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research.” In Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Technical Invention, from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Alistair C. Crombie. London: Heinemann, 1963. With John L. Heilbron, Paul Forman, and Lini Allen. Sources for History of Quantum Physics: An Inventory and Report. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 68. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1967. With John L. Heilbron. “The Genesis of the Bohr Atom.” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 1 (1969): 211–290. “Alexandre Koyré and the History of Science: On an Intellectual Revolution.” Encounter 34 (1970): 67–69. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd enlarged ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. First published in 1962. The second edition contains the 1969 “Postscript.” “Notes on Lakatos.” In PSA 1970: In Memory of Rudolf Carnap; Proceedings of the 1970 Biennial Meeting, Philosophy of Science Association, edited by Roger C. Buck and Robert S. Cohen. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 8. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1971. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. 2nd ed. with a new “Afterword.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. “History of Science.” In Current Research in Philosophy of Science, edited by Peter D. Asquith and Henry E. Kyburg. East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, 1979. “The Halt and the Blind: Philosophy and History of Science.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 31 (1980): 181–192. The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview. Edited by James Conant and John Haugeland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. OTHER SOURCES Barnes, Barry. T. S. Kuhn and Social Science. London: Macmillan, 1982. Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. A critical overview. Darrigol, Olivier. “The Historians’ Disagreement over the Meaning of Planck’s Quantum.” Centaurus 43 (2001): 219–239. Friedman, Michael. “On the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and Its Philosophical Agenda.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 29 (1998): 239–271. Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Galison, Peter. “Kuhn and the Quantum Controversy.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 32 (1981): 71–85. Gutting, Gary, ed. Paradigms and Revolutions. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980. Written by eminent philosophers, social scientists, and historians of science, these essays assess Kuhn’s pre-1980 writings and their impact in various fields. Horwich, Paul, ed. World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. An in-depth discussion of Kuhn’s latest views; also contains Kuhn’s long reply “Afterwords,” which is his final statement. Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Meticulous exposition, with a foreword by Kuhn. Irzik, Gürol, and Teo Grünberg. “Carnap and Kuhn: Arch Enemies or Close Allies?” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (1995): 285–307. Kindi, Vasso. “The Relation of History of Science to Philosophy of Science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Kuhn’s Later Philosophical Work.” Perspectives on Science 13 (2006): 495–530. Koyré, Alexandre. Études galiléennes. Paris: Hermann, 1939. Also 1966 and 1997. Translation by John Mepham as Galilean Studies. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978. Lakatos, Imre, and Alan Musgrave, eds. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. London: Cambridge University Press, 1970. An early classic volume displaying the then-current state of debate among Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend, and others. Newton-Smith, W. H. The Rationality of Science. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. A good overview of philosophy of science. Nickles, Thomas, ed. Thomas Kuhn. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Sankey, Howard. Rationality, Relativism and Incommensurability. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1997. Sharrock, Wes, and Rupert Read. Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2002. Westman, Robert S. “Two Cultures or One?: A Second Look at Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution.” Isis 85 (1994): 79–115. Gürol Irzik Kuhn, Thomas Samuel (b. 18 July 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio; d. 17 June 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts), physicist turned historian and philosopher who transformed the study of the history and philosophy of science in the 1960s. Kuhn was one of two children of Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn, a civic activist and professional editor; both were nonobservant Jews. When Kuhn was an infant, the family moved to New York City. The home atmosphere was politically liberal, and his parents sent him to “progressive” schools that encouraged pupils to think for themselves. In the mid-1930s—as the Great Depression gripped America, fascism threatened Europe, and Stalin tightened his control of the Soviet Union—Kuhn attended the progressive Hessian Hills School in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. There, he later recalled, “there were various radical left teachers all over.” Young Kuhn participated in May Day marches and was an articulate pacifist, but as World War II approached, he changed his mind and supported U.S. intervention. In 1940 he entered Harvard University, where he majored in physics, served as an editor of the Harvard Crimson, and graduated summa cum laude in 1943 (a year early because of wartime mobilization). During the war he worked on radar countermeasures at a U.S. laboratory in England and visited radar facilities on the Continent. He witnessed the liberation of Paris. Afterward, he returned to Harvard and pursued a doctorate in physics, although by this time he was more interested in philosophy, especially that of Kant. The turning point in Kuhn’s life came when he was befriended by Harvard president James B. Conant, who sought Kuhn’s aid in developing a program to teach science to nonscience majors. The course would emphasize “case histories” of scientific research through the centuries. On a hot summer day in 1947, while doing research for the Conant course and reading Aristotle’s Physics, Kuhn experienced an epiphany. To a modern scientist, Aristotle appears hopelessly antiquated, but Kuhn suddenly understood how the philosopher’s physical notions made sense within the intellectual context of ancient Greece. Kuhn compared this new understanding (a type of “empathetic historiography,” that is, the effort to understand past cultures in their own terms rather than critiquing them by modern standards) to the gestalt switch cited by gestalt psychologists. A familiar example of a gestalt switch is a drawing of what appears to be ducks. Gaze at the sketch long enough, and suddenly they look like rabbits: What changes is not the raw data (the drawing) but rather one’s perception of it. According to traditional historical accounts, science had advanced over the centuries by steadily accumulating raw data, in the manner advocated by the Elizabethan scholar-politician Francis Bacon. By contrast, Kuhn realized that fundamental scientific revolutions may occur via reinterpretations of the same old data. His appreciation of the importance of such shifts in consciousness was strengthened when he read the works of Alexandre Koyré, who argued that Galileo’s achievements owed more to the seventeenth-century astronomer’s theoretical insights than to his celebrated physics experiments. On 27 November 1948 Kuhn married Kathryn Muhs; they had three children. Kuhn received his M.S. degree in 1946 and his Ph.D. in 1949, both from Harvard. In 1951 he lectured on the nature of scientific change at the Boston Public Library. From 1952 to 1956 he was an assistant professor of general education and the history of science at Harvard. In 1956 Kuhn accepted a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley. His first book, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957), lucidly explained how in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries astronomers abandoned the ancient astronomer Ptolemy’s Earth-centered cosmology for the Sun-centered theory of Nicolaus Copernicus. Although Copernicus relied on the same observational data as Ptolemy, the former astronomer perceived a totally different arrangement of celestial bodies—another example of a gestalt switch. Kuhn’s most famous work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), depicted the history of science as alternating periods of placid “puzzle-solving” and revolutionary changes of perspective, akin to gestalt switches that he dubbed “paradigm shifts.” A mature scientific field operates with basic assumptions (in other word, paradigms, such as Ptolemaic or Copernican astronomy) that steer research in specific directions. No paradigm is all-explanatory: it always faces a number of “anomalies”—scientific observations or experimental results that challenge its underlying assumptions. (For example, pre-Copernican astronomers struggled for centuries to understand why planets moved in “anomalous” directions inconsistent with predictions of the Ptolemaic cosmology.) During a period of “normal science,” researchers try to explain anomalies in a manner consistent with the paradigm—a process that Kuhn called “puzzle solving.” Over time, the accumulation of anomalies can become unbearable. Scientists struggle to “explain away” the anomalies in increasingly ad hoc ways. Rather than continue sticking with the old paradigm, a few scientists suggest radical alternatives. Most of these alternatives will fail, but one or more might offer real advantages, such as greater conciseness or predictive power. Eventually this new paradigm may displace the old one. Does science progress? In that regard, Kuhn’s most disturbing claim was that scientific paradigms are at least partly “incommensurable”: one paradigm cannot necessarily be treated as a special case subsumed by its successor. For example, the terminology of Newtonian physics cannot readily be translated into the terminology of its successor, Einsteinian physics. This is because terms such as “mass” and “force” have different meanings within each paradigm. (Kuhn’s thinking here was indirectly inspired by the linguistic and anthropological ruminations of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Benjamin Lee Whorf.) True, progress occurs within a paradigm; scientists can accumulate more and more information that is compatible with the paradigm. But when science shifts from one paradigm to another, it is harder to say whether “progress” has occurred, for one paradigm’s terms may be incommensurable with the other’s. Hence, Kuhn suggested, comparing two paradigms is like comparing apples and aardvarks, and a scholar might reasonably question whether one paradigm is “truer” than its predecessor. Although tentative and vague, Kuhn’s comments on incommensurability stirred excitement and controversy, for they appeared (on the surface, anyway) to question a cherished tenet of modernism: that science invariably progresses over the centuries. Indeed, Kuhn suggested (again, somewhat vaguely) that in certain time periods, science may move backward—in other words, lose “knowledge” by pursuing paradigms that prove to be blind alleys. Kuhn’s book became a best-seller by academic standards. About 750,000 copies were sold during his lifetime. His views especially intrigued social scientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, who debated how (and whether) they should try to develop organizing paradigms for their conflict-bloodied fields. Kuhn’s ideas also attracted attention from social critics of science, who gained attention in the 1960s and 1970s partly because of growing public concern about the high-tech Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, and environmental destruction. Kuhn also attracted critics. The philosopher Imre Lakatos accused Kuhn of attributing scientific change to “mob psychology.” Another philosopher, Karl Popper, said Kuhn’s view of “normal science” sanctioned a semiauthoritarian ethic of scientific research. According to Popper, Kuhnianism implied that scientists should blindly obey paradigmatic rules in hopes that these would lead, ironically, to revolutionary insights. To the contrary, Popper declared: scientists should openly challenge authority by proposing “outrageous” hypotheses to test and perhaps “falsify” orthodox ideas. Upset, Kuhn insisted that both his admirers and critics had misinterpreted him. According to academic folklore, his postscript to the 1970 edition of Structure backed away from some of his earlier claims. However, a careful reading of the postscript suggests that he abandoned no crucial position. Kuhn’s status as the field’s radical visionary was challenged by the rise of more overtly radical, colorful figures, such as the “episteme” theorist Michel Foucault and “anarchic epistemologist” Paul K. Feyerabend. Compared to them and the more recent postmodern scholars, Kuhn looked conservative, even orthodox. A distinctly Kuhnian school never emerged. One reason is that some historians of science rejected Kuhn’s model as being too vague or as irrelevant to most historical episodes of scientific change. Another reason is that Kuhn trained few doctoral students. Although he could become passionate and animated during intellectual discussion, he was a shy, chain-smoking loner who liked to cultivate his ideas at his own pace. By his own admission (in a 1995 interview), he tended to drive students away by insisting on rigorous intellectual standards. Kuhn left Berkeley in 1964 for Princeton, where he was the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science until 1979. While at Princeton, he served as physics adviser on the editorial board of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. In the latter part of his Princeton years, he published The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977) and the highly controversial Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912 (1978), which questioned the standard account of Max Planck’s discovery of the quantum nature of matter and energy. In September 1978 Kuhn divorced Kathryn; the next year he became the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On 26 October 1982 he married Jehane Burns. In his last years he tried to complete a final book clarifying his views and answering his critics. The book was unfinished when he died from cancer of the bronchial tubes. Thanks partly to Kuhn, the study of the history of science—once regarded as an academic backwater—became a respectable intellectual field in the late twentieth century. His views have been quoted (and misquoted) by thinkers across the intellectual spectrum, as Hegel’s were in his heyday. Less happily for Kuhn, his ideas were co-opted by popular culture: the term “paradigm shift” has become a cliche from Main Street to Madison Avenue. In popular parlance, it refers to any radical shift of opinion or worldview. Certain aspects of Kuhn’s thinking were anticipated by other scholars, among them Ludwik Fleck in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (original German edition, 1935); R. G. Collingwood in Essay on Metaphysics (1940); W. V. O. Quine in Word and Object (1960); and Stephen Toulmin in Foresight and Understanding (1961). Kuhn frankly discussed his life and work in an interview published as “A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn,” which appears in the Greek scholarly journal Neusis 6 (spring summer 1997): 145–200. Important biographical material, including the possible role of psychoanalytic thought in influencing Kuhn’s philosophical outlook, is in Jensine Andresen, “Crisis and Kuhn,” Isis 90 (1999): S43-S67. The numerous detailed analyses of Kuhn’s work include David A. Hollinger, “T. S. Kuhn’s Theory of Science and Its Implications for History,” American Historical Review (1973): 370, and Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science (1993), both of which Kuhn regarded highly. Attacks on Kuhn appear in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970); Steven Weinberg, “The Revolution That Didn’t Happen,” New York Review of Books (8 Oct. 1998); and Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (2000). A forceful reply to Fuller is David A. Hollinger, “Paradigms Lost,” New York Times Book Review (28 May 2000). A profile of Kuhn in his last years is in John Horgan, The End of Science (1996). Obituaries are in the New York, Times (19 June 1996) and Washington Post (20 June 1996). See also an insightful obituary by one of Kuhn’s early students, John L. Heilbron, “Thomas Samuel Kuhn,” Isis 89 (1998): 505–515. Keay Davidson Thomas Samuel Kuhn Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science. He found that basic ideas about how nature should be studied were dogmatically accepted in normal science, increasingly questioned, and overthrown during scientific revolutions. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1922, Thomas Kuhn was trained as a physicist but became an educator after receiving his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1949. He taught as an assistant professor of the history of science at Harvard from 1952 to 1957, as a professor of the history of science at Berkeley (California) from 1958 to 1964, as a professor of the history of science at Princeton from 1964 to 1979, as a professor of philosophy and the history of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1979 to 1983, and finally, Laurence Rockefeller professor of philosophy at MIT from 1983 to 1991. A member of many professional organizations, he was president of the History of Science Society from 1968 to 1970. He received the Howard T. Behrman award at Princeton in 1977 and the George Sarton medal from the History of Science Society in 1982. Kuhn's scholarly achievements were many. He held positions as a Lowell lecturer in 1951, Guggenheim fellow from 1954 to 1955, fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science from 1958 to 1959, director of the Sources for the History of Quantum Physics Project from 1961 to 1964, director of the Social Science Research Council from 1964 to 1967, director of the program for history and philosophy of science at Princeton from 1967 to 1972, member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1972 to 1979, and member of the Assembly for Behavioral and Social Science in 1980. Kuhn was best known for debunking the common belief that science develops by the accumulation of individual discoveries. In the summer of 1947 something happened that shattered the image of science he had received as a physicist. He was asked to interrupt his doctorate physics project to lecture on the origins of Newton's physics. Predecessors of Newton such as Galileo and Descartes were raised within the Aristotelian scientific tradition. Kuhn was shocked to find in Aristotle's physics precious little a Newtonian could agree with or even make sense of. He asked himself how Aristotle, so brilliant on other topics, could be so confused about motion and why his views on motion were taken so seriously by later generations. One hot summer day while reading Aristotle, Kuhn said he he had a brainstorm. "I gazed abstractly out the window of my room. Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together, my jaw dropped," as reported by his friend and admirer, Malcolm Gladwell, in the July 8th issue of The New Yorker. He realized that he had been misreading Aristotle by assuming a Newtonian point of view. Taught that science progresses cumulatively, he had sought to find what Aristotle contributed to Newton's mechanics. This effort was wrong-headed, because the two men had basically different ways of approaching the study of motion. For example, Aristotle's interest in change in general led him to regard motion as a change of state, whereas Newton's interest in elementary particles, thought to be in continuous motion, led him to regard motion as a state. That continuous motion requires explanation by appeal to some force keeping it in motion was taken as obvious by Aristotle. But Newton thought that continued motion at a certain speed needed no explanation in terms of forces. Newton invoked the gravitational force to explain acceleration and advanced a law that an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an external force. This discovery turned Kuhn's interest from physics to the history of physics and eventually to the bearing of the history of science on philosophy of science. His working hypothesis that reading a historical text requires sensitivity to changes in meaning provided new insight into the work of such great physicists as Boyle, Lavoisier, Dalton, Boltzmann, and Plank. This hypothesis was a generalization of his finding that Aristotle and Newton worked on different research projects with different starting points which eventuated in different meanings for basic terms such as "motion" or "force." Most people probably think that science has exhibited a steady accumulation of knowledge. But Kuhn's study of the history of physics showed this belief to be false for the simple reason that different research traditions have different basic views that are in conflict. Scientists of historically successive traditions differ about what phenomena ought to be included in their studies, about the nature of the phenomena about what aspects of the phenomena do or do not need explanation, and even about what counts as a good explanation or a plausible hypothesis or a rigorous test of theory. Especially striking to Kuhn was the fact that scientists rarely argued explicitly about these basic research decisions. Scientific theories were popularly viewed as based entirely on inferences from observational evidence. But no amount of experimental testing can dictate these decisions because they are logically prior to testing by their nature. What, if not observations, explains the consensus of a community of scientists within the same tradition at a given time? Kuhn boldly conjectured that they must share common commitments, not based on observation or logic alone, in which these matters are implicitly settled. Most scientific practice is a complex mopping-up operation, based on group commitments, which extends the implications of the most recent theoretical breakthrough. Here, at last, was the concept for which Kuhn had been searching: the concept of normal science taking for granted a paradigm, the locus of shared commitments. In 1962 Kuhn published his landmark book on scientific revolutions, which was eventually translated into 16 languages and sold over a million copies. He coined the term "paradigm" to refer to accepted achievements such as Newton's Principia which contain examples of good scientific practice. These examples include law, theory, application, and instrumentation. They function as models for further work. The result is a coherent research tradition. In his postscript to the second edition, Kuhn pointed out the two senses of "paradigm" used in his book. In the narrow sense, it is one or more achievement wherein scientists find examples of the kind of work they wish to emulate, called "exemplars." In the broad sense it is the shared body of preconceptions controlling the expectations of scientists, called a "disciplinary matrix." Persistent use of exemplars as models gives rise to a disciplinary matrix that determines the problems selected for study and the sorts of answers acceptable to the scientific community. Using the paradigm concept, Kuhn developed a theory of scientific change. A tradition is pre-scientific if it has no paradigm. A scientific tradition typically passes through a sequence of normal science-crisis-revolution-new normal science. Normal science is puzzle-solving governed by a paradigm accepted uncritically. Difficulties are brushed aside and blamed on the failure of the scientist to extend the paradigm properly. A crisis begins when scientists view these difficulties as stemming from their paradigm, not themselves. If the crisis is not resolved, a revolution sets in, but the old paradigm is not given up until it can be replaced by a new one. Then new normal science begins and the cycle is repeated. Just when to accept a new paradigm and when to stick to the old one is a matter not subject to proof, although good reasons can be adduced for both options. Scientific rationality is not found in rules of scientific method but in the collective judgment of the scientific community. We must give up the notion that science progresses cumulatively toward the truth about reality; after a revolution it merely replaces one way of seeing the world with another. Kuhn's theory of scientific change was the most widely influential philosophy of science since that of his mentor, Sir Karl Popper. Kuhn's claims were much discussed by scientists, who generally accepted them; by sociologists, who took them to elucidate the subculture of scientists; by historians, who found cases of scientific change not fitting his model; and by philosophers, who generally abhorred Kuhn's historical relativism about knowledge but accepted the need for their theories of science to do justice to its history. Kuhn was often perturbed by those who sought to— in his view—apply his ideas to areas where it was inappropriate. "I'm much fonder of my critics than my fans," he often said, according to Gladwell's New Yorker article. Indeed, he even tried in later years to replace the term "paradigm"—which he felt was being overused—with "exemplar." Kuhn died June 17, 1996, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Notwithstanding the tendency of some to misapply his theories, history will show that Kuhn indeed transformed the image of science by making it exciting and emphasizing that it is a social process in addition to being a rational one. Further Reading Kuhn's four books are The Copernican Revolution (1957), The Essential Tension (1959), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, second edition 1970), and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894-1912 (1978). Clear discussions of his views in order of increasing sophistication are found in George Kneller's Science as a Human Endeavor (1978), Garry Gutting's Paradigms and Revolutions (1980), Harold Brown's Perception, Theory and Commitment (1977), and Ian Hacking's Scientific Revolutions (1981). "My Jaw Dropped," by Malcolm Gladwell in the July 8th issue of The New Yorker is a tribute by an admirer. His obituary, by Lawrence Van Gelder, is in the June 29th edition of The New York Times. □
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7992	dbpedia	2	49	https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/did-thomas-kuhn-kill-truth	en	Did Thomas Kuhn Kill Truth? — The New Atlantis	https://www.thenewatlant…ordahlbanner.jpg	https://www.thenewatlant…ordahlbanner.jpg	[ "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/themes/thenewatlantis/assets/about.png", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/themes/thenewatlantis/assets/arrow-right.svg", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/themes/thenewatlantis/assets/arrow-right.svg", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/themes/thenewatlantis/assets/arrow-right.svg", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/themes/thenewatlantis/assets/arrow-right.svg", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/uploads/legacy/20180914_TNA55Kordahlbanner.jpg", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/uploads/legacy/20180914_TNA55KordahlTheAshtray.jpg", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/?attachment_id=20729", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/who-is-the-new-atlantis-for/attachment/issue-page-gettyimages-544240978-594x594", "https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/themes/thenewatlantis/assets/logo-footer.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2018-09-14T04:00:00+00:00	A debate on the nature of truth turns into a squabble over whether Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at Errol Morris’s head.	en	https://www.thenewatlant…hite-1-32x32.jpg	The New Atlantis	https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/did-thomas-kuhn-kill-truth	In 2011, the filmmaker and writer Errol Morris published a series of five articles that may rank as the oddest production of his long and varied career. The first began like this: It was April, 1972. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. The home in the 1950s of Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. Thomas Kuhn, the author of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and the father of the paradigm shift, threw an ashtray at my head. Taken by itself, this sort of flamboyant anecdote seems like pure Morris, consonant with the other series he has published with the New York Times as part of their Opinionator section — series that have explored, among other things, the hagiography of Abraham Lincoln, the perceived credibility of various typefaces, and the contrasts between photographic evidence and photographic art. As the documentarian behind such films as Gates of Heaven (the one about the pet cemetery), The Thin Blue Line (the one that introduced re-enactment into true-crime docs), and The Fog of War (the one with Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara), Morris has been given a wide berth to explore his interests in public. But the articles about Thomas Kuhn, collectively titled “The Ashtray,” and now reworked into the book The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality), seemed rawer than usual. Morris now seemed not fascinated or amused — his usual registers — but angry. It was as though, after nearly forty years since his run-in with Kuhn at Princeton, the time had come for revenge. But if this was revenge, it was revenge of a strange sort, taking the form of extended diatribes against postmodernism, the historiography of science, and Kuhn’s classic work on scientific revolutions. Revenge, of course, is sweet. But it can also be hard to get. “The Ashtray” centers on Morris’s brief stint as a graduate student — he lasted a year — in what was then Princeton’s Program in the History and Philosophy of Science. The program was “sort of a consolation prize,” in his defensive version, for being rejected from Harvard’s history of science program. During this time, Morris had the bad fortune to fall in with the physicist, philosopher, and historian Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996). Kuhn’s fame rested on his widely influential 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he argued that the history of science was punctuated by occasional “paradigm shifts.” Kuhn held that scientific theories from before and after a scientific revolution cannot be compared in a straightforward way; they are “incommensurable,” because the meanings of familiar terms change in unexpected ways as scientists go from one mode of description to another. One drastic consequence of incommensurability is that there isn’t any such thing as absolute progress from one paradigm to the next — say from before the Copernican Revolution to after, or from classical physics to quantum physics. A new paradigm may be more complete, or simpler, or more useful for answering certain questions compared to the preceding one, but it is not, strictly speaking and on the whole, objectively better. Kuhn’s skepticism, in Morris’s view, is poisonous, leading to a cultural devaluation of objective truth. Tellingly, Morris only glancingly notices Kuhn the historian, whose The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957) and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912 (1978) are both carefully documented, in apparent contradiction to the recklessness Morris alleges. A certain theatricality is at play in Morris’s articles on Kuhn — the first article is accompanied by a few seconds of video, an ashtray and cigarettes spewing across a black background — and Kuhn emerges mainly as a personality, not a thinker. Morris’s Kuhn is an imposing man, a tall bully, an “incredible chain-smoker. First Pall Malls and then True Blues…. Alternating. One cigarette lighting another.” He barks at students for “Whiggishness” whenever they incorporate knowledge of the present into talk of the past. When Morris mentions he is interested in hearing the philosopher Saul Kripke, Kuhn commands, “Under no circumstances are you to go to those lectures. Do you hear me?” In a story recounted in the first article, Morris turns in a thirty-page paper, double-spaced. Kuhn returns a thirty-page response, single-spaced: “No margins. He was angry, really angry.” Morris goes in to confront Kuhn and charges into an argument. If paradigms are incommensurable, young Morris asks, how is the history of science possible? “He’s trying to kill me,” mutters Kuhn, head in hands. When Morris suggests that maybe it’s still possible “for someone who imagines himself to be God,” Kuhn throws an ashtray at him. Soon thereafter, Kuhn has Morris kicked out of Princeton. Errol Morris projects have long featured monomaniacal obsessives, in ways that are both positive (Stephen Hawking’s retreat into physics in the 1991 documentary A Brief History of Time) and negative (Fred A. Leuchter’s electric-chair designs and Holocaust denial in the 1999 Mr. Death). At one point in Wormwood, Morris’s 2017 Netflix miniseries about Eric Olson’s investigation of his father’s death in 1953, Olson clarifies that when he first asked himself whether the CIA had murdered his father, he didn’t know that the question would take up the next forty years of his life. For “The Ashtray,” Morris casts himself in a similar role. For monomaniacs, it should be noted, narrow focus can turn open fields into blind alleys. In one of the “Ashtray” articles, Morris comes across an interview where Kuhn explains that his discussions of incommensurable paradigms were inspired by the mathematical notion of incommensurability. We can see a simple example of this notion in the relationship between the sides and the diagonal of a square. If the side of a square is exactly 1 foot long, then its diagonal measures √2 feet, a value that can’t be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers. When the Greeks discovered this, they reasoned in terms of the lengths of line segments, so incommensurability for them meant that the diagonal couldn’t be defined as a ratio of multiples of the side of the square. Kuhn borrowed this as a metaphor for how paradigms before and after a scientific revolution might use the same words to describe their theories, while labeling different worlds. Not satisfied by this vague correspondence, Morris asks for a more precise account of what mathematical and Kuhnian incommensurability have to do with each other. In search of an answer, he dives deep into the history of Greek math, vividly recounting his quest after an ancient book on Pythagoras — down an elevator, through a tunnel, into the mysterious lower floors … of the Widener library at Harvard. He even provides the book’s call number. Morris wants to find out whether the legend might be true that Pythagoreans murdered Hippasus, the philosopher said to have first uncovered the secret of incommensurability, upending a central plank of Pythagorean mathematics and metaphysics. Morris admits that Kuhn never even mentions the legend. But maybe the metaphor is that Hippasus’ upending of conventional math is like a paradigm shift that the guardians of the old paradigm tried to prevent by killing him? The story itself is likely false, Morris concludes — and so, ironically, Kuhn’s idea is based on “a Whiggish interpretation of an apocryphal story.” Which is an okay punchline, but has almost nothing to do with Kuhn. Morris gets lost again when he exegetes a passage where Kuhn complains, after reading his critics, that he is tempted to posit the existence of two Kuhns. The quote suggests that Kuhn felt his critics disagreed not with his actual views but with distortions of his views — with the views of a fictional Kuhn. It’s an unremarkable expression of frustration, but Morris calls it “particularly bizarre” and holds that it “suggests that there may be no coherent reading of Kuhn’s philosophy.” The slander piles up. Kuhn is compared to Jorge Luis Borges’s character Pierre Menard and to Humpty Dumpty — both given as examples of the madness of relativism — and to the jailer in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, who alone escapes this relativism because he can see all the jail cells (read: paradigms). An anecdote about Kuhn becoming agitated over how people had been convinced by Hitler is used to imply that Kuhnians, those truth-deniers, are easy marks for Nazis. By the last entry in “The Ashtray,” Morris seems convinced that we, like him, will detest anything stinking of Kuhn. “You won’t be able to understand it,” he prefaces one long Kuhn quote. “Just take my word for it.” Morris closes his series by reminding us that if we were about to die on the electric chair, knowing we were unfairly convicted, we wouldn’t entertain any postmodern doubts about absolute truth, now, would we? Hmm? “The Ashtray” was published online. This had the benefit — pixels are cheap — of allowing many idiosyncratic pictures to accompany the text, from photos of ashtrays and cigarettes to paintings of the Pythagoreans by Raphael and Rubens. It also had the decidedly mixed blessing of reader comments, which might lead anyone into postmodern doubt. Scrolling through the responses, I noticed the comments falling into the usual slots of cynical praise (“One of the finest descriptions of graduate school ever”), unhelpful snark (“Unclear here just what the point is”), and bilious grandstanding (“I’ll try to make this as concise as I possibly can”; please do). But then came something interesting, a signed response from Sarah Kuhn, daughter of Thomas (she confirmed to me by email that she really wrote it): Steer clear of fact checkers, Mr. Morris. The ashtray video is a work of art, as is your essay. Since you take the trouble to mention the Pall Malls, which he never smoked (it was Camels), I wonder about the accuracy of the throwing episode. In all my years with him, I knew my father to be vehement but never violent. Responding to a later article, Thomas Kuhn’s son Nat also demurred: There is apparently yet another Thomas Kuhn here, one I don’t think he would have ever anticipated: the Thomas Kuhn who threw the ashtray. Speaking as his son I have to say that, try as I might, I just can’t get myself to believe that he threw that ashtray. Could it be? Could Errol Morris, that vigorous defender of truth, be lying? Appearing on an April 2017 episode of the philosophy podcast Hi-Phi Nation, Morris was as unhesitant as ever about Kuhn’s toxic influence on our culture’s sense of truth. Generously, he grants that “in my angrier moments, I see him as not entirely responsible for the debasement of science and the debasement of truth.” Yet “I see a line from Kuhn to Karl Rove and Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump.” (This excerpt was quoted by John Horgan at his blog for Scientific American, which prompted Morris to offer a clarification: “If Kuhn had never lived, in that possible world where Kuhn was never born, there might still be a President Donald Trump.”) Asked to summarize what he makes of Kuhn now, Morris simply says, “A**hole.” But in that same podcast, the other Kuhn also appears. Another guest on the episode is James Challey, a student of Kuhn at the same time as Morris, who remembers Kuhn as “very personable,” but also very insistent. Asked whether Kuhn could have thrown the ashtray, Challey hesitates. “I could — imagine that happening? The provocation would have had to’ve been pretty strong.” I would like to suggest that this proliferation of Kuhns — the violent Kuhn, the vehement but personable Kuhn, Kuhn the careful historian, Kuhn the reckless philosopher — is no fluke. Even if no one is lying about any of these seemingly conflicting images, and even if all parties observed the same person, they might wrap those observations in such different words that they end up disagreeing. This happens all the time. Indeed, allowing that it happens also in science gets us a long way toward understanding Kuhn. The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality) is now being published as a book, and it is both significantly less odd and significantly better defended than the articles that spawned it. In the preface, Morris now asks about the ashtray, “Was it thrown at my head? I’m not sure, but I remember it was thrown in my direction.” Kuhn’s Pall Malls have now become Camels. For the most part, Morris still battles a straw-man Kuhn. But much of the new stuff here is fascinating, nestled, as it is, among copious illustrations, between thick margins containing extensive footnotes. Whatever my complaints, The Ashtray is a lot of fun to read. Alongside the anti-Kuhn spleen, a positive argument is hinted at throughout these pages. The argument follows that of the American philosopher Saul Kripke, whose work in logic and philosophy of language — particularly his landmark Naming and Necessity (1980) — Morris posits as an antidote to Kuhn’s poisonous Structure. By Morris’s admission, it is unusual to bring Kripke to a Kuhn fight. After all, the interests of Kuhn (the social structure of science) and of Kripke (how names work in modal logic) don’t have a lot of obvious overlap. To understand Morris’s alleged connection, we should pause to revisit in a bit more detail the basic message of Thomas Kuhn. What exactly is Morris fighting? As many others have noted, Kuhn’s claims about science, history, and knowledge are all snarled. In places, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions reads more like a meta-myth than like straight history. Even converts might admit that its elements could fall apart in isolation. In Structure, Kuhn holds that science changes via two different modes: “normal science,” in which scientists solve puzzles within a given paradigm, and “revolutionary science,” in which scientists, compelled by unexplained anomalies, adopt a new paradigm that can explain them. These paradigm shifts are not fully rational. That is, according to Kuhn, the reason early adopters sign on to a new paradigm is not that it offers greater truth in any straightforward sense. For instance, early quantum theory was an ad hoc kludge. When Max Planck suggested that light from hot objects was emitted in discrete packets (multiples of a constant rather than values along a continuous spectrum), it wasn’t for any revolutionary purpose, but simply because he found that doing so could help him to fit experimental data. The reigning paradigm, mature classical electromagnetism, had been very successful, and there was little reason to doubt that it could explain the data in terms, say, of the microscopic constituents of ordinary solids. Early quantum adopters needed to be either ignorant or visionary (most were both) to suppose that such an explanation was not possible, and to suppose instead that the data suggested fundamentally new laws of nature. But once a new paradigm has matured, its ways of looking at problems and methods of solving them become so pervasive among scientists that the successes of prior paradigms are forgotten. Today, educated by quantum theorists and having read textbooks on quantum theory, few scientists are eager to revisit thermal emission in classical electrodynamic terms. “Normal” scientists — those working firmly within an established paradigm — press on using paradigmatic methods, making incremental improvements within an essentially stable conceptual frame. In all of this, Kuhn can be maddeningly imprecise. Indeed, Kuhn himself admits as much, writing in his postscript to the second edition of Structure that some parts of his “initial formulation” produced “gratuitous difficulties and misunderstandings.” Famously, he proliferates examples of paradigmatic markers — usually textbooks, such as Aristotle’s Physics or Newton’s Opticks — without ever clearly defining what exactly a paradigm is. But wobbles like these are not what bother Errol Morris. What gets under his skin is Kuhn’s strange insistence that changes in scientific paradigms change not only the way scientists investigate the world, but the very world itself. As Kuhn puts it, “In so far as their only recourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world.” Morris takes this as a wholesale rejection of the real world, replacing the sturdy truth with a meaningless mess of mere paradigms that never really get at the world itself, trading the world for words. Which, at last, is where Kripke comes in. According to Morris, what’s “at the heart of Kripke’s work” is that “language is not just about us and our thoughts; it directly — unmediated by our opinions and beliefs — connects us with the world.” Language as an unmediated connection to the world? This sounds a little hard to understand. And it is, a little. In Naming and Necessity, Kripke discusses how proper names function in modal logic. If that sounds dry — well, again, it is, a little. But the parts of Kripke that Morris uses for his argument require some jargon, and we now step tenderly into the weeds. Philosophers since Kant have widely used the categories of a priori and a posteriori to discuss claims about knowledge. Roughly, a priori claims are ones that can be evaluated as true or false based on logic alone, without going out into the world and gathering evidence. For instance, “3 + 5 = 8” is true a priori. By contrast, a posteriori claims need evidence. “Our solar system has eight planets” is true a posteriori (stop, no crying for Pluto), as astronomers had to gather lots of observations to figure that out. While a priori and a posteriori concern how we gain knowledge of things, the categories of necessary and contingent — much used by Kripke — describe the nature of things in themselves. Kripke explains the difference between necessary and contingent by introducing another concept, that of possible worlds. Necessary truths are true in all possible worlds, while contingent truths are true only in some possible worlds. Possible worlds refer to the different ways the universe could be while remaining the same in certain metaphysically essential ways. Think of the worlds proposed by alternative history novels, or by thought experiments asking you to consider a world in which your parents never met. The same two examples work to illustrate the difference: In any of these worlds, we should expect the claim “3 + 5 = 8” to be true. We could therefore label this claim necessarily true. By contrast, a claim like “Our solar system has eight planets” (Pluto, come back!) is only contingently true, because we can easily imagine a universe only slightly different from our own in which the initial conditions of the solar system created a different number of planets. From these examples, one might suppose that necessary is just a synonym for a priori, and contingent a synonym for a posteriori. But Kripke takes pains to argue that this isn’t right, and he gives specific counterexamples. He has us consider the length of one meter, which was defined for well over a century as the length of a specific metal bar in France. When this definition was widely accepted, the claim “The Mètres des Archives is one meter long” was a contingent a priori truth: It was a definition (hence the bar was a meter long a priori), but we could easily imagine a different bar doing the job (hence its truth was contingent). Kripke then gives examples of the converse, the necessary a posteriori truth. To explain, he introduces an idea about how words refer to the world, and how they retain that reference over time. He says that when we first name a specific thing in the world, this “initial baptism” rigidly fixes the name’s reference in all possible worlds. Richard Nixon, for instance, is necessarily Richard Nixon always and everywhere, but he is only contingently the thirty-seventh president of the United States. It is conceivable that he might not have become president, but he could not have been anybody else but Richard Nixon. So the name is fixed, a permanent reference from the words to the particular person. (The fact that he could have been called something else is irrelevant; all that matters is that we know him as Richard Nixon.) Philosophers describe this as Kripke’s “causal theory of reference,” and Morris is mainly interested in how it applies to science. Kripke applied it to the famous case of Phosphorus, the morning star, and Hesperus, the evening star. Scientists learned through observation — that is, they learned a posteriori — that both are the same object: the planet Venus. Since, like Nixon, Venus is necessarily identical to itself (Venus can’t be anything other than Venus), the statement “Phosphorous is Hesperus” is a necessary a posteriori truth. Kripke suggests that establishing such truths might be the job of science more generally. Perhaps, to use another example from Kripke, gold is necessarily made up of atoms with 79 protons, because that’s what makes gold gold — regardless of what we initially thought about the substance or what we have learned about it since. And … so what? Wasn’t this supposed to have something to do with Thomas Kuhn? Morris gets irritated by the suggestion that the connection is anything less than obvious: Years ago I was challenged by a graduate student in the history of science: What do Kripke’s theories have to do with Kuhn’s? The question seemed naïve, even silly. Of course, they are related. They both focus on the relation between language and the world. Kripke establishes something that undermines the entire basis of Kuhn’s work — the necessary a posteriori. It may well be the ultimate goal of scientific inquiry. In the account of Morris’s Kripke, words pick out elements of the world, and as our views evolve, these terms are passed on and progressively refined. For a substance like gold, these investigations help us to figure out what the thing we labeled “gold” was all along. Anyway, contra Kuhn, we don’t have to worry about incommensurability in our vocabularies — since we’re talking about the real world, our underlying references are fixed! I’ve called the holder of this view “Morris’s Kripke” because Saul Kripke himself, as an interview subject late in the book, seems reluctant to co-sign for any claims as certain as those Morris ascribes to him. (Of a separate argument, Kripke comments, “Someone has written a whole book defending the view I portray as not only coherent but as the truth. I don’t know whether I agree with him completely” and “I’m not saying that this is the truth, but I’m arguing like a lawyer for my position.”) Such interpersonal dissonance keeps The Ashtray from being merely dogmatic. Morris seeks out luminaries to bolster his claims — but often they don’t. These interviews are worth reading. We find out Hilary Putnam’s views on translation and Steven Weinberg’s views on scientific histories. Kripke weighs in on Wittgenstein, and Noam Chomsky argues for the ambiguity of how words refer to the world in ordinary, non-scientific language. Morris tries to coax Ross MacPhee, a biologist studying an extinct species, to outline how the species’ essential properties can be defined retrospectively — yes, yes, the necessary a posteriori. Like most good conversations, these yield more questions than answers. Still, I can imagine closing The Ashtray feeling totally convinced. This would take place, I suppose, in the possible world where I’m an Errol Morris fan who hasn’t read any Kuhn. But in this world, I’m an Errol Morris fan who has also read some Kuhn. Morris might contend that I’ve been poisoned. In any case, I admit it: I have doubts. The preface to The Essential Tension (1977) — Thomas Kuhn’s first essay collection published post-Structure — offers advice for students working to interpret primary sources in science. “When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them.” Kuhn continues, “When those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.” Whatever your views on Kuhn, this seems like good advice. It’s also the exact opposite of Errol Morris’s approach to Kuhn in The Ashtray. Of course, if Morris directly experienced Kuhn as a violent maniac, this is understandable; few of us are eager to consider our abusers as important thinkers. On the other hand, with over a half-century of continued appeal, Kuhn must offer something beyond dogmatism and a halo of ash. So what, in his anger, has Morris left out? Let’s start with how well Kuhn was able to capture the way science is actually done. Unlike Kripke, Kuhn was one of us, a Ph.D. physicist whose firsthand knowledge of “normal science” allowed him to document scientific investigations in sensitive detail. To fellow scientists, many of Kuhn’s claims seem less perverse than they are self-evident. When Kuhn discusses how paradigms define the way scientists approach the world, most of us will nod along, remembering the difficult years spent in reproducing classic experiments and solutions. The description of normal science as puzzle-solving within a paradigm certainly resonates with those of us actively searching for problems to tackle. By contrast, you’d be hard pressed to find a single working scientist who is out to discover necessary a posteriori truths. Nevertheless, I suspect that beyond the fetching jargon and neat anecdotes, most scientists would in fact disagree with Kuhn’s more radical claims. For instance, many physicists will agree that the world really is a certain way — that, to the best of our knowledge, everything really is made of relativistic quantum fields. For such physicists, Einstein superseded Newton not for any sociological reason, but because he got closer to the truth. Kuhn, however, was adamant that conflicting paradigms couldn’t be compared so directly. To him, Einstein and Newton described genuinely different worlds, not simply better and worse renditions of the same one we all inhabit. The clearest articulation of Kuhn’s final position can be found in The Road Since Structure (2000), a posthumous miscellany. While the presentation rehashes many of Kuhn’s trademark concepts, it also acknowledges and addresses many of the usual concerns. Discussing incommensurability, Kuhn allows that we can always adopt the lexicon of a competing paradigm (listen up, Mr. Morris: this is how histories are written!), but he still maintains that we can only speak a single language at once, and hence still can’t exactly translate old into new terms. In the title essay — a sketch for a future, never-completed book — Kuhn calls his final view “a sort of post-Darwinian Kantianism.” Kuhn’s theory had always been recognized as “post-Darwinian” in the sense that he argued that the development of science, like biological evolution, is “driven from behind, not pulled from ahead.” Scientific theories are accepted because of how well they solve the problems facing scientific communities at particular historical moments, rather than how well they correspond to the absolute truth about the world. As he was working on his final book, Kuhn realized another sense in which biological evolution could provide a model for the development of science. The diversification of living things into different species, each with a specialized environmental niche, has an analogue in the diversification of science into narrowly specialized fields. And much as organisms from different species are unable to interbreed, the specialized lexicons of different scientific fields make it ever more challenging for different scientific specialists to understand one another. The Kantian aspect of Kuhn’s view has to do with Kant’s notion that our experiences are inevitably filtered through certain categories of understanding, such as the concept of cause and effect. In Kuhn’s words: “Like the Kantian categories, the lexicon” — the way scientists talk about the world within a given paradigm — “supplies preconditions of possible experience.” In other words, the concepts we project on the world inextricably shape how we experience it, and scientists’ paradigmatic lexicon shapes how they see the world. Kuhn is sometimes described as a relativist, full stop; but this isn’t quite right. Kuhn admits there’s something objectively out there. But he qualifies that this thing-in-itself (as Kant put it) is “ineffable, undescribable, undiscussable.” So what can we do? Mostly, we talk, casting our nets over the dark sea. Once we settle on a stable way of talking, we can evaluate claims as objectively true or false. When a seemingly more useful way of talking arises, that’s a scientific revolution. In this new way of talking we can once again evaluate claims as objectively true or false, even if, using the same words as before, claims that were true in the old way of talking might be false in the new way, and vice versa. The issue here is not the denial of reality, but the denial of an absolutely preferred way of talking about it. Statements can be true or false, but not whole languages. As Kuhn puts it, “The ways of being-in-the-world which a lexicon provides are not candidates for true/false.” This is a “coherence theory” of truth, where truth applies not to the world but to statements about the world — and even then only in a given language, only with a given use. This idea is perhaps disturbing, but it doesn’t amount to what critics like Morris think. Morris charges Kuhn with claiming that the world is however we want it to be, but Kuhn in fact claims the opposite. In Kuhn’s view, reality is out there, but it doesn’t speak our language. It remains forever alien, non-linguistic, regardless of how well we seem to describe its various parts. Now, I concede that a lot of this is controversial, and that disagreement with Kuhn can be perfectly reasonable. But there’s a boundary between disagreement and purposeful misrepresentation, and Errol Morris often stomps clear across this line. On page four of The Ashtray, Morris states, “Coherence theories of truth are of little interest to me.” He demonstrates this conclusively by failing to explore them for the remaining 180 pages. Instead, Morris imagines Kuhn as the villain in various scenarios — telling children that the Earth could just as well be flat or round, or telling a condemned man that his guilt or innocence is all about the paradigm. Morris barely mentions, and even then only dismissively, that Kuhn addressed Kripke’s ideas in writing. (The short version of Kuhn’s response is that, although causal theories of reference work reasonably well for some tidy examples like gold, they don’t work for terms whose uses have drastically changed over time, like heat or water.) And never, it seems, has Morris seriously asked himself: What did Kuhn really think? Near the end of the book, Morris summarizes his view of Kuhn: For me, Kuhn’s ultimate crime is not the espousal of nonsense. We’re probably, in varying degrees, all guilty of that. No, to me, there is a worse crime. The history of his endless textual revisions and supposed clarifications is a history, among other things, of moral and intellectual equivocation. Several commentators have argued that Kuhn was aware of my criticisms long before I made them. To me, that exacerbates the situation; it does not mitigate it. When I first read this passage, it seemed not to make sense. To me, these “endless textual revisions and supposed clarifications” sounded suspiciously like thinking. And if Kuhn was aware of Morris’s criticisms, shouldn’t Morris be interested in that? Shouldn’t Morris, that bloodthirsty truth-hound, be curious whether Kuhn’s responses had force? Following Kuhn’s advice to pay special attention to seemingly absurd passages and to ask why a sensible person would write them, I reread it. And Kuhn was right — the meaning changed. Suddenly all the stuff about truth seemed sort of moot, and I realized that Morris, the spurned grad student, had gotten his revenge. But against whom? Readers who arrive initially unconcerned may find that Morris has won his fight fair and square, and that Kuhn, that violent obfuscator, has finally gotten the drubbing he deserves. But those of us who look again may notice that Morris has been punching the wrong Kuhn, while the real one sits outside the ring, untouched. Like his imaginary Kuhn, Morris wins the fight for truth only by getting the last word.
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Kuhn" ]	null	Read 1,653 reviews from the world’s largest community for readers. A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actu…	en	/favicon.ico	Goodreads	https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61539.The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions	October 5, 2014 Scientists are so passionate about their work, and even if you're a scientist yourself it can sometimes take you by surprise to see just how passionate they are. A few years ago, when I was working at NASA, we made up a game called If Research Were Romance. Here, let me show you how to play. In real life, Thomas Kuhn wrote a book about paradigm changes in science. But if research were romance, he might have written a book about relationships instead. It might have been quite similar in many ways. Scientists care so much about their theories that you won't go far wrong if you think about the feelings they have for those theories as being similar to the feelings that normal people have for their significant others. If research were romance, Thomas Kuhn might have said that, when you're in a committed relationship, that relationship colors all your life. A lot of what you do and think only makes sense in terms of the relationship. And everyone over, say, 20, knows that relationships are not always easy. You're continually having problems, some of them little, some of them not so little. But if you're prepared to work on them, you can usually solve those problems, and when you've done so you usually feel that the relationship is stronger, not weaker. The fact that you've surmounted the problem gives you more faith in the relationship. If research were romance, Thomas Kuhn might have gone on to say that sometimes you get another feeling. The problems won't disappear, or they go away in one form and immediately return in another. You start to feel that the relationship is undergoing a real crisis. But you'll probably still continue to work on it, unless you meet another person who offers you a chance of something different. If you've been in your relationship a long time, it will feel difficult to consider seriously the idea of abandoning it and starting a new one. Sometimes, though, people do this. They won't really know why they're taking this drastic step, and they won't be able to justify it clearly in their minds. It will just seem like the right thing to do. If research were romance, Thomas Kuhn might have added that, after the old relationship has ended and the new one has started, it will be hard to see your old life in the same terms. Your view of it will now be colored by your new relationship. Now, you will probably only be able to see the old relationship as containing faults which you never noticed at the time. You will not really be able to remember what it was like. If research were romance, Thomas Kuhn might have said that some people believe that they have a true soulmate out there, and it's just a question of finding that special person they are fated to be with. But he wouldn't have believed that. He'd have said that people sometimes change their partner, and often they may do it for a good reason. But there is no absolute sense in which the new partner is better suited to them than the old one. They are better in some ways and worse in others. If research were romance, Thomas Kuhn would have been a rock star. Security staff would have been needed to stop groupies getting into his hotel room and he'd have been unsure about how many children he'd fathered. He'd have played it down in interviews, but everyone would have known what the deal was. If you also work in science, I encourage you to experiment with this game. You'll be amazed how much insight it gives you into what's really going on. May 20, 2013 With the publication of this landmark work, Kuhn gave an entirely new way to think about science and the process of scientific discovery; it completely contradicted what was previously believed about the functioning of scientific discovery and how we came to discoveries about the natural world. The philosophy of science before Kuhn began writing was most influenced by Karl Popper. He put forth the popular notion of falsifiability, whereby all scientific theories are tenable only if they are falsifiable, and theories can only be proven wrong with evidence that falsifies it. Kuhn says that that’s not how science works and it’s certainly not how scientists operate. Kuhn put everything in terms of paradigms—the phrase paradigm shift was made popular by this work. And the paradigm is what is supposed to be the method by which scientists make discoveries about the world. Before I delve into this, I have to say that I am conflicted about all the ideas that Kuhn propounds in this seminal work. I have commitments to other opinions I hold (especially having to do with the divide between religion and science). Out of a reaction to many religious apologetic positions, I have placed strong conviction in my views regarding scientific inquiry and formations of beliefs. In my discovery of the limitations of our ideas and ability to obtain knowledge, I feel a part of me tug away from it because of what it might imply regarding all the debates regarding God and apologetics. A common apologetic move is to capitalize upon our limitations on knowledge in order to motivate the view that a God exists. As what happened with the logical positivists, many have overreacted to preponderance of sloppy theism in society and overstepped their bounds and placed too much conviction in our ability to come to knowledge and the capacity for science to make meaningful discoveries. I’m not sure if this is what is pulling me away from Kuhn’s ideas, for Kuhn certainly places science in a much different light than we all have been taught. But, it is crucially important to keep in mind our biases, like the one that I have laid out for myself, while analyzing Kuhn’s ideas. Setting aside any implications about the theist, atheist debacle (which is unfortunately unavoidable while discussing anything about science and scientific discoveries), I will try to give an account of Kuhn’s ideas, as I understand them to be. The traditional view of science—see Karl Popper’s writings on the scientific method—is that scientists gather individual pieces of data from the natural world and when there is a sufficient amount of pieces of data, we can draw inferences about the relation between individual pieces of data. These inferences we draw about the world become hypotheses about the nature of the relation between these pieces of data—(a set of objects fall towards the ground, the scientist notices that all objects act in this way, then she posits the most likely explanation to account for this related set of phenomenon). Each hypothesis is accepted or rejected based on its ability to account for greater or lesser amounts of other pieces of data. Of course, we take falling objects to be under the influence of gravity, but Aristotle had a much different account of what was occurring when objects fell towards the ground. But after people discovered enough conflicting data that contradicted Aristotle’s theories, they were overturned and more robust theories took their place. This depicts science as a continual reformulation of theories to fit an ever-expanding knowledge base. It depicts science as slowly progressing towards the truth as it accumulates new pieces of data which are considered in light of the currently-held theories. In order for the theory to be tenable, it must be the best interpretation (the interpretation that makes the least amount of assumptions) which justifies the evidence. And all it takes is for a single piece of evidence to overthrow that theory and that theory will no longer be considered a tenable one. However, Kuhn doesn't think this is how scientists really operate. While it's true that old theories do get over-turned by new evidence, it is a slow and gradual process, and it comes with great resistance from scientists working in their respective fields. When people used to believe in geocentricism, there were a great number of problems that came about as a result of this hypothesis. One of the many problems was the retrograde motion of the planets: http://www.scienceu.com/observatory/a.... When scientists began calculating the movement of the planets, they noticed that as a planet moved across the night sky, it moved backwards during a part of the year, then forward during another. But if the earth was in the middle of the solar system, why would planets move across the night sky, then seemingly move backwards in their orbits? In order to account for a geocentric universe and the retrograde motion of the planets, the astronomer Ptolemy posited what were called epicycles. Epicycles were the hypothetical orbit patterns of planets that accounted for the retrograde motion of the planets. The planets orbited around points which in turn followed the path of orbit around the earth. These were generally considered to be false, and the scientists who came later made fun of the Ptolemaics who believed in it. According to the classical view of science, Ptolemy was simply wrong with his epicycle hypothesis and as scientists amassed greater amounts of evidence, the hypothesis was rendered obsolete with the discovery of the fact that the earth is not the center of the universe. Kuhn uses an example like this to motivate his critique of the traditional view of scientific practice and inquiry, re Popper and falsification. Kuhn points to examples of how scientists have tried to cram new data into pre-existing theories. Scientists try to account for new data by forcing them to fit with background assumptions and they do not use these new pieces of data to overthrow those background assumptions which may be suspect. For Kuhn, scientists aren’t in the business of trying to falsify their own hypotheses. Instead, scientists work within what Kuhn calls a paradigm. A paradigm is essentially a backdrop set of assumptions and biases which inform everything about discoveries in science and the formation of hypotheses about the world. Instead of science being this thing which accumulates facts, Kuhn says that “normal” science—what we usually think of when talking about science—is merely “filling in the details” after a paradigm has been put in place. Kuhn challenges our conception of progress in science: he calls a shift in paradigms, a revolution in science: when a set of theories and hypotheses come along that radically change the ways we view the world (the Copernican revolution, Einstein’s theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, etc.), it radically changes the way scientists conduct experiments, devise test implications and form hypotheses. The only type of “progress” for Kuhn, is drawing out the full implications of a certain paradigm once it’s been established. Given enough time, the full implication of the paradigm will be realized, and the limits of the paradigm will become known to scientists working in their respective fields. This is the process that Kuhn calls “normal science” and it is the science as we know it. This is the process of gathering facts to build hypotheses that explain phenomena in the world. But it is all done within a framework, within that background set of assumptions that constitute the paradigm. Most scientists will agree that one of the marks of a robust theory is if it fits with knowledge that we’ve already acquired. If, for instance, we are presented with a hypothesis that seems to contradict the theory of gravity, we have good reason to be suspicious of it, and to not believe it. So, instead of challenging the notion of gravity (which is often taken to be absolutely true), we find ways to either reassess the data or reformulate our experiment. This is one of the ways in which we work within the confines of the paradigm. However, if there comes to be enough conflicting evidence with a strongly-held theory, it might be cause to shift the paradigm. Once enough problems pile up for a certain paradigm, it will be rejected in favor of another paradigm. When enough evidence piles up against a certain set of assumptions it will be completely overturned. Each paradigm has its limits as far as how much each paradigm can accurately account for phenomena in the natural world. Eventually after scientists have filled in the details of a given paradigm, they will discover all the problems and limitations of the paradigm and overthrow it in favor a new one. And each one is a merely a way of understanding the universe, not the way of understanding it. In this way, Kuhn does not believe that science can arrive at one absolute truth, one absolute fact of the matter when it comes to understanding the universe; nature, as he says, is far to complex and nuanced to ever be captured by the tools available to human thought and understanding. Kuhn is not necessarily out to disparage science, or make it seem illogical. He, in fact, thinks that it is remarkable that science has the ability to do this: fundamentally change the set of assumptions that inform the theories within it. It is this ability that gives science the edge on dogmatic beliefs, which remain inflexible and unchanging despite contrary evidence. And for Kuhn, the paradigm is an essential aspect to collecting information. Pre-paradigm science is merely “random fact collecting”. And this seems to make some sense. Without a set of tools for interpretation, it’s difficult to make sense of any specific thing. Even in our daily experience of the world, we are in a constant state of directly perceiving things and concurrently stringing that thing through with significance by virtue of a set of assumptions that inform our interpretation of it. In this sense, Kuhn is attacking the direct realist notion that we experience objects in the world directly and exactly as they are. Much of Kuhn’s ideas, while never made explicit in the text, stem out of this notion which goes back as far as Descartes, and his skepticism of knowledge based on the senses. Descartes laid the foundation for thinkers like Kant, who tried to describe the process involved with our understanding and its interaction with experience in the world. What’s most important about the whole discussion is the idea that we do not experience the world as it is, but rather, we process information about the outside world via a filter which informs the beliefs we construct out of sense experience. Kuhn is working in this same vein by illustrating that the paradigm is part of this filter between us and world which informs all the biases and assumptions in the process of collecting data and making sense of it. Although Kant believed that this filter gave rise to a single “paradigm” or way of understanding the world and forming beliefs, Kuhn says that the features of the paradigm has changed throughout history as we’ve found new ways of conceiving of the universe. And through these different ways of viewing the world, we have formulated vastly different theories about the universe. What Kuhn is propounding here, is a type of belief holism, which depict ideas as coming in large chunks, or part of a net of interrelated connections, and all of which is informed by a set of assumptions that underly each idea. Belief atomism, by contrast, might depict our ideas in a direct realist sense, i.e. we have direct access to objects of the universe, in and of themselves, thus we can pull apart and dissect each idea on its own without any worry that it is part of some interconnected whole. A good way of grasping what Kuhn is after with “paradigms” and his brand of belief holism is to analyze examples from the history of scientific discoveries. A set of examples which illustrates this pretty clearly are two conceptions of projectile motion. This is the phenomena of throwing an object across a room, and when the object leaves your hand, it continues to move, despite the fact that the thing moving it (your hand) is no longer in contact with the object. This was quite the conundrum for many thinkers and scientists in the past. And to fully explain what projectile motion meant to someone like Aristotle, as opposed to Newton, will take a good amount of set-up, as both of their conceptions of what is going on, is deeply-seated in their ideas about the metaphysics of the universe. But after explaining how both came to understand this phenomenon, it might make sense of the belief holist position that Kuhn thinks underlies all scientific inquiry. So, for Aristotle, all things were composed of earth, air, water, fire and aether. And each one of these elements had its “place” in the universe. Space is subordinate to place, in that all of matter was subject to the place in which it belonged, and all things were working towards the end goal of getting to the place it belonged. This made Aristotle’s depiction of the universe teleological, goal oriented. He viewed the universe as a thing, biological which worked towards an end goal (like an acorn growing into a tree). All of matter functioned in this way, moving towards its final end goal. Aristotle figured that since most earth was beneath us, the “place” that earth belonged was towards the center of the universe. Thus, when you pull something off the earth, its tendency is to fall back down to the ground. Without a concept like gravity and all the physics associated with it, this gave a fairly plausible explanation of that phenomenon. But this left a real puzzle: projectile motion. How could an object containing earth continue to move forward if its fundamental tendency was towards the ground? What is it that keeps it in the air? Aristotle posited a thing called “antiperistasis” which kept the earth particles in the air for an extended period of time before touching the ground. Notice how “antiperistasis” doesn’t make much sense without first having given a background sketch of Aristotle’s other beliefs about the world. Kuhn would have it that it’s impossible to talk about this concept in and of itself without understanding all the other peripheral ideas that inform the meaning of it. Newton, by contrast, introduced much of what our modern conception of the universe tells us: objects continue to move in straight-line motion until acted upon by outside forces. This is the principle of inertia. Newton postulated that if there were only one object in the universe that it would continue to be moving forward ad infinitum . In fact, there is no fundamental difference between moving and staying still in the Newtonian picture of inertia. This is because it only makes sense to say that something is moving relative to another object. If there are two objects in the universe, object A and object B, and oA moves past oB we can only definitively say that oA moves a certain direction relative to our reference frame of oB. The upshot of this is Newton’s first law of motion. This means that an object’s tendency is to always move in straight-line motion until it's effected by some other force in the universe. Take the ball flying out of my hand. The ball’s natural tendency is to move in a straight-line, but the ball falls back to the ground because of the force of gravity acting upon the inertial motion of the ball. Kuhn says that there’s no real answer to the question “who’s account of projectile motion is better, Aristotle or Newton’s?” because they both are coming from radically different paradigms which make such fundamentally different assumptions about the universe that there are, to use Kuhnian language, incommensurable, i.e. they just can not be compared. Kuhn believes that no paradigm will ever be able to capture the capital ‘t’ truth about the universe, that the universe is far too complex and multifaceted to ever be captured by any given paradigm. Some paradigms can better account for the available evidence, offer more cogent explanations of the universe and some can have far greater explanatory power than others, but no paradigm will ever get to the absolute truth; this is something that Kuhn whole-heartily rejects. We can never attain the absolute truth because there will always be a filter through which we analyze and understand the universe, the filter being the limited capacity of our senses and our capacity for understanding. I think that at least some of what Kuhn says has to be right, and it seems to make a lot of sense out of different world-views and starkly different viewpoints: many positions in science, politics, etc. really seem to be incommensurable with each other. A socialist feminist and a neo-con libertarian will most likely speak directly past one another as neither one will find any kind of common ground with which to communicate their ideas. It might be the same for the Aristotelian and the Newtonian. I’m still not sure however, if my own ability to write about their two positions counts as a counter-example against Kuhn or not. We still seem, despite our huge difference in opinions to communicate on some level, however much we may disagree with each other. September 25, 2023 În facultate, am urmat și un curs de Epistemologie. El se rezuma la studiul a trei filosofi ai științei. Primul era Karl Raymund Popper (cu Logik der Forschung, în românește, volumul a primit un titlu cacofonic, Logica cercetării ), al doilea Thomas S. Kuhn și, în fine, Paul K. Feyerabend (cu vestita lucrare Against Method, în care găsim lozinca „Everything goes”). Contribuția lui Kuhn poate fi rezumată prin termenul „paradigmă”. Paradigma (sau „matricea disciplinară”) e ceea ce împărtăşesc între ei membrii unei comunităţi ştiinţifice la un moment dat: natura problemelor, algoritmul de rezolvare, metaforele dominante etc. Ştiinţa nu e cumulativă, ci discontinuă. Paradigmele sînt, în opinia lui Thomas S. Kuhn, incomensurabile. Trecerea de la o paradigmă la alta presupune un salt, o revoluție: cercetătorii părăsesc brusc o problematică și un limbaj pentru o altă problematică și un alt limbaj. Această opinie m-a uimit, fiindcă istoriile diferitelor științe prezintă, de obicei, evoluția lor ca fiind liniară, continuă, fără fracturi. De exemplu, matematicienii (Descartes, Fermat) propun o problemă și apoi timp de secole succesorii lor încearcă s-o dezlege. Nu procedează pe sărite. Nu suferă de amnezie... În același timp, studentul care compară Fizica lui Aristotel cu un manual de fizică de azi este frapat în primul rînd de diferența radicală dintre ele. Aristotel înțelegea cu totul altceva prin fizică decît noi. Interesul și problematica fizicienilor s-au schimbat radical. Cei care au recenzat „eseul” (e chiar termenul său) lui Thomas S. Kuhn i-au reproșat că nu a folosit cu maximă rigoare noțiunea de „paradigmă” („termenul este folosit în cel puțin 22 de sensuri diferita”, p.249). Într-un „Post scriptum” din 1969 (pp.241-278), autorul și-a recunoscut neatenția și a venit cu un comentariu lămuritor. Paradigma numește o comunitate științifică, problemele și credințele împărtășite de membrii ei, exemplele la care trimit. În treacăt fie spus, Stanley Fish a preluat ideea lui Kuhn și a vorbit de „comunități interpretative”. February 20, 2018 عن سلوك الأفراد الذين يقومون بمسح المنشورات القديمة لهم على الفيسبوك لأنها أصبحت ساذجة جداً بالنسبة لهم ** "إن العلم الذي يتردد في مسألة نسيان مؤسسيه خاسر" وايتهيد "أخشى أنه لديك تغيير في البراديجم" يعالج الكاتب أحد المشكلات التي يراها في تأريخ العلم, وهي الإدّعاء بأن العلم تراكمي "إن الظاهرة المميزة لكتب تدريس العلم هي أنها تحتوي على قدر قليل من التاريخ يوجد في فصل تمهيدي, أو غالبا ما يوجد في إشارات مبعثرة إلى الأبطال العظام لعصر سابق. وبفضل هذه الإشارات يشعر الطلاب والمهنيون الاختصاصيون بأنهم مشاركون في تراث تاريخي مديد. ومع ذلك, فإن التراث المشتق من كتب التدريس الذي به يشعر العلماء بمشاركتهم هو تراث غير موجود في الواقع. ولمبررات واضحة ووظيفية, لا تشير كتب تدريس العلوم إلا إلى ذلك الجزء من عمل العلماء القدامى الذي يمكن النظر إليه على أنه إسهامات في نص وحل مشكلات براديغم هذه الكتب. وقد جرى تمثيل علماء العصور السابقة تمثيلا ضمنيا, على أنهم اشتغلوا على مجموعة المشكلات الثابتة نفسها, وطبقا لمجموعة القوانين الثابتة ذاتها التي جعلتها أحدث ثورة في النظرية العلمية والمنهج العلمي تبدو علمية. فلا غرابة في لزوم إعادة كتابة كتب الدراسة والتراث التاريخي الذي تتضمنه بعد كل ثورة علمية. ولا عجب في أن يبدو العلم, بعد إعادة كتابتهما, وللمرة الثانية تراكميا بصورة كبيرة" فالعلم كما يوضح الكاتب ليس تراكمي وإنما تعاقب براديجمات/paradigms, والبراديجم كما يعرّفه هو منظومة المعتقدات والقيم والتقنيات وما شابه, والتي يشترك فيها أعضاء المجتمع العلمي وتتغير البراديجمات عقب الثورات العلمية التي تؤدي إلى تعديل البراديجم أو إبدال البراديجم القديم بآخر جديد وتنتج الثورة نتيجة ظهور حالة عدم توقع (شواذ عن القاعدة) في البراديجم السائد, والتي تتطور لظهور أزمة, وهذه الأزمة غالبا ما يقوم العلماء بوضع حلول ظاهرية لها, ولكن في الجانب الآخر هنالك من كان يرفض البراديجم القديم ويقدم نظريات جديدة تعمل كبراديجم جديد "دورة كون: 1-العلم العادي/الصوري 2-نموذج عدم التوقع 3-نموذج الأزمة 4-نموذج الثورة 5-تغيير البراديجم" ولكن قبل أن يُقبل البراديجم الجديد تحدث المناقشات والصراعات الغير مجدية في الكثير من الأحيان, لأن كل فريق له براديجم خاص ينظر به للأمور, فالبديهيات والمقدمات لدى كل منهم مختلفة, وكما قال صديقه"فايرابند" من قبل, فإنه من غير الممكن أن يتم مقارنة البراديجمات المختلفة كما أن البراديجم الجديد, وإن كان يفسر أزمة معينة, فهو لا يستطيع في بدايته أن يحل الكثير من المشاكل التي استطاع حلها البراديجم القديم, فعليه أن ينتظر الكثير حتى يكثر معتنقوه ويصبغوا النظريات اللازمة واستُخدم لفظ "معتنقوه" في العبارة السابقة تحديداً, لأن العلماء لا يكون لديهم في البداية الأدلة الكافية, فيتبعون حدسهم وغالبا ما يكون معتنقوا البراديجم الجديد من الباحثين الشباب, أما ذوي الخبرة الطويلة فلا يتحوّلون عن البراديجم القديم أبداً بسبب التحيّز التأكيدي وعدم اعترافهم بالخطأ, ولطالما لُوحظت صعوبات التحول من قبل العلماء أنفسهم. وقد كتب داروين قائلا بوعي نفّاذ في مقطع في نهاية كتابه أصل الأنواع (origin of species): "وبالرغم من أني مقتنع اقتناعا كاملاً بصحة النظرات المعطاة في هذا المجلد..., إلا أنني لا أتوقع, بأي شكل, أن أقنع الطبيعيين ذوي الخبرة الذين تخزنت في عقولهم كثرة من الحقائق نظر إليها كلها, ولمدى سنين طويلة, من منظور مضاد مباشرةً لمنظوري...ولكني بثقة أنظر إلى المستقبل- إلى طبيعيين شُبّان وطالعين, يكونون قادرين على النظر إلى وجهيّ المسألة نظرة خالية من الانحياز" كما لاحظ ماكس بلانك بحزن, وهو يلقي بنظره نظرة عامة على حياته الخاصة في كتابه "سيرة ذاتية علمية", قائلاً: "لا تفوز حقيقة علمية جديدة عن طريق إقناع خصومها وجعلهم يرون النور, بل لأن خصومها سينتهون بالموت, وأن جيلا جديداً سوف يترعرع ويألفها" "ماذا لو لم نفعل أي شيء على الإطلاق وانتظرنا شيء سحري لكي يحدث ؟!" ولذلك فقد يضمحل العلم والتكنولوجيا إذا تم الخلود للبشر قبل أن يتوفر تقنية للتصرف مع نقاط ضعف الإدراكات الإنسانية كالتحيّز التأكيدي, فتخيلوا معي عالم من كبار السن, الذين مازالوا يشيرون إلى الآن للكمبيوتر بألفاظ مثل "البتاع ده", وهم يبقون ويتعاقب عليهم الأجيال المختلفة من التكنولوجيا والموضة!! فلنعود الآن للموضوع الأساسي, وماذا كان قبل أول براديجم؟ قبل أول براديجم يكون هناك مجهودات مشتتة, ولا تثمر بنفس النتائج التي يأتي بها المجهودات العلمية في ظل براديجم معين, فالبراديجم يوفر قاعدة من المبادئ والقوانين المتفق عليها بينه وبين المجتمع العملي وبالتالي لا يحتاج إلى أن يشرح القواعد الأساسية في كل مرة, وأيضا لا يحتاج لأن يقنع العامة بكلامه وتبسيط المجال لهم, مما يسمح للباحث أن يخوض في موضوعات أكثر تخصصية, كما أنه يمنحه الثقة لاستثمار المزيد من وقته في هذا المجال ذو البراديجم المتفق عليه وسط مجتمع علمي وهكذا فوجود براديجم ولو خاطئ إلى حد كبير, فهو أفضل من لاشيء "ظهور الصدق من الخطأ هو أسرع من ظهوره من الفوضى" فرانسيس بيكون "هل لنا أن نرى هذه الخدعة ثانية من فضلك ؟ على السبورة: خلايا عصبية + سحر = الوعي" المحتوى سهل وبسيط ولكن الجمل طويلة شوية ودا اللي ممكن يخلي الكتاب مش مناسب للقراء المبتدئين ولكن للقارئ المتوسط, أو المبتدئ اللي مستعد يبذل مجهود, وترجمة "المنظمة العربية للترجمة" كويسة في معظم الكتاب في كل صفحة فيه قصص تاريخية كثيرة, وربما هي ما لطفت المحتوى الفلسفي الجاف قليلاً, مرفق معها مراجع للاستزادة بطريقة توضح مدى إلمام الكاتب بتاريخ العلوم, رغم أنه لم يكن الكارير الأساسي له, فهو قد قام بتغيير مهنته بعد أن كان على وشك الإنتهاء من أطروحته لنيل الدكتوراه في الفيزياء النظرية!! "أخبار جيدة, إنني أسمع بأن البراديجم يتغير" الكتاب يقع ضمن مصاف الكتب التي وضعت الإنسان في حجمه الطبيعي "مؤلف الكتاب: توماس كون" July 26, 2019 To listen to this review as a podcast, click below: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... ________________________ Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time. This is one of those wonderfully rich classics, touching on many disparate fields and putting forward ideas that have become permanent fixtures of our mental furniture. Kuhn synthesizes insights from history, sociology, psychology, and philosophy into a novel conception of science—one which, despite seemingly nobody agreeing with it, has become remarkably influential. Indeed, this book made such an impact that the contemporary reader may have difficulty seeing why it was so controversial in the first place. Kuhn’s fundamental conception is of the paradigm. A paradigm is a research program that defines a discipline, perhaps briefly, perhaps for centuries. This is a not only a dominant theory, but a set of experimental methodologies, ontological commitments, and shared assumptions about standards of evidence and explanation. These paradigms usually trace their existence to a breakthrough work, such as Newton’s Principia or Lavoisier’s Elements; and they persist until the research program is thrown into crisis through stubborn anomalies (phenomena that cannot be accounted for within the theory). At this point a new paradigm may arise and replace the old one, such as the switch from Newton’s to Einstein’s system. Though Kuhn is often spoken of as responding to Popper, I believe his book is really aimed at undermining the old positivistic conception of science: where science consists of a body of verified statements, and discoveries and innovations cause this body of statements to gradually grow. What this view leaves out is the interconnection and interdependence between these beliefs, and the reciprocal relationship between theory and observation. Our background orients our vision, telling us where to look and what to look for; and we naturally do our best to integrate a new phenomenon into our preexisting web of beliefs. Thus we may extend, refine, and elaborate our vision of the world without undermining any of our fundamental theories. This is what Kuhn describes as “normal science.” During a period of “normal science” it may be true that scientific knowledge gradually accumulates. But when the dominant paradigm reaches a crisis, and the community finds itself unable to accommodate certain persistent observations, a new paradigm may take over. This cannot be described as a mere quantitative increase in knowledge, but is a qualitative shift in vision. New terms are introduced, older ones redefined; previous discoveries are reinterpreted and given a new meaning; and in general the web of connections between facts and theories is expanded and rearranged. This is Kuhn’s famous “paradigm shift.” And since the new paradigm so reorients our vision, it will be impossible to directly compare it with the older one; it will be as if practitioners from the two paradigms speak different languages or inhabit different worlds. This scandalized some, and delighted others, and for the same reason: that Kuhn seemed to be arguing that scientific knowledge is socially solipsistic. That is to say that scientific “truth” was only true because it was given credence by the scientific community. Thus no paradigm can be said to be objectively “better” than another, and science cannot be said to really “advance.” Science was reduced to a series of fashionable ideas. Scientists were understandably peeved by the notion, and social scientists concomitantly delighted, since it meant their discipline was at the crux of scientific knowledge. But Kuhn repeatedly denied being a relativist, and I think the text bears him out. It must be said, however, that Kuhn does not guard against this relativistic interpretation of his work as much as, in retrospect, he should have. I believe this was because Kuhn’s primary aim was to undermine the positivistic, gradualist account of science��which was fairly universally held in the past—and not to replace it with a fully worked-out theory of scientific progress himself. (And this is ironic since Kuhn himself argues that an old paradigm is never abandoned until a new paradigm takes its place.) Though Kuhn does say a good deal about this, I think he could have emphasized more strongly the ways that paradigms contribute positively to reliable scientific knowledge. For we simply cannot look on the world as neutral observers; and even if we could, we would not be any the wiser for it. The very process of learning involves limiting possibilities. This is literally what happens to our brains as we grow up: the confused mass of neural connections is pruned, leaving only the ones which have proven useful in our environment. If our brains did not quickly and efficiently analyze environmental stimuli into familiar categories, we could hardly survive a day. The world would be a swirling, jumbled chaos. Reducing ambiguities is so important to our survival that I think one of the primary functions of human culture is to further eliminate possibilities. For humans, being born with considerable behavioral flexibility, must learn to become inflexible, so to speak, in order to live effectively in a group. All communication presupposes a large degree of agreement within members of a community; and since we are born lacking this, we must be taught fairly rigid sets of assumptions in order to create the necessary accord. In science this process is performed in a much more formalized way, but nevertheless its end is the same: to allow communication and cooperation via a shared language and a shared view of the world. Yet this is no argument for epistemological relativism, any more than the existence of incompatible moral systems is an argument for moral relativism. While people commonly call themselves cultural relativists when it comes to morals, few people are really willing to argue that, say, unprovoked violence is morally praiseworthy in certain situations. What people mean by calling themselves relativists is that they are pluralists: they acknowledge that incompatible social arrangements can nevertheless be equally ethical. Whether a society has private property or holds everything in common, whether it is monogamous or polygamous, whether burping is considered polite or rude—these may vary, and yet create coherent, mutually incompatible, ethical systems. Furthermore, acknowledging the possibility of equally valid ethical systems also does not rule out the possibility of moral progress, as any given ethical system may contain flaws (such as refusing to respect certain categories of people) that can be corrected over time. I believe that Kuhn would argue that scientific cultures may be thought of in the same pluralistic way: paradigms can be improved, and incompatible paradigms can nevertheless both have some validity. Acknowledging this does not force one to abandon the concept of “knowledge,” any more than acknowledging cultural differences in etiquette forces one to abandon the concept of “politeness.” Thus accepting Kuhn’s position does not force one to embrace epistemological relativism—or, at least not the strong variety, which reduces knowledge merely to widespread belief. I would go further, and argue that Kuhn’s account of science—or at least elements of his account—can be made to articulate even with the system of his reputed nemesis, Karl Popper. For both conceptions have the scientist beginning, not with observations and facts, but with certain arbitrary assumptions and expectations. This may sound unpromising; but these assumptions and expectations, by orienting our vision, allow us to realize when we are mistaken, and to revise our theories. The Baconian inductivist or the logical positivist, by beginning with an raw mass of data, has little idea how to make sense of it and thus no basis upon which to judge whether an observation is anomalous or not. This is not where the resemblance ends. According to both Kuhn and Popper (though the former is describing while the second is prescribing), when we are revising our theories we should if possible modify or discard the least fundamental part, while leaving the underlying paradigm unchanged. This is Kuhn's "normal science." So when irregularities were observed in Uranus’ orbit, the scientists could have either discarded Newton’s theories (fundamental to the discipline) or the theory that Uranus was the furthest planet in the solar system (a superficial fact); obviously the latter was preferable, and this led to the discovery of Neptune. Science could not survive if scientists too willingly overturned the discoveries and theories of their discipline. A certain amount of stubbornness is a virtue in learning. Obviously, the two thinkers also disagree about much. One issue is whether two paradigms can be directly compared or definitively tested. Popper envisions conclusive experiments whose outcome can unambiguously decide whether one paradigm or another is to be preferred. There are some difficulties to this view, however, which Kuhn points out. One is that different paradigms may attach very different importance to certain phenomena. Thus for Galileo (to use Kuhn’s example) a pendulum is a prime exemplar of motion, while to an Aristotelian a pendulum is a highly complex secondary phenomenon, unfit to demonstrate the fundamental properties of motion. Another difficulty in comparing theories is that terms may be defined differently. Einstein said that massive objects bend space, but Newtonian space is not a thing at all and so cannot be bent. Granting the difficulties of comparing different paradigms, I nevertheless think that Kuhn is mistaken in his insistence that they are as separate as two languages. I believe his argument rests, in part, on his conceiving of a paradigm as beginning with definitions of fundamental terms (such as “space” or “time”) which are circular (such as “time is that measured by clocks,” etc.); so that comparing two paradigms would be like comparing Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometry to see which is more “true,” though both are equally true to their own axioms (while mutually incompatible). Yet such terms in science do not merely define, but denote phenomena in our experience. Thus (to continue the example) while Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometries may both be equally valid according to their premises, they may not be equally valid according to how they describe our experience. Kuhn’s response to this would be, I believe, that we cannot have neutral experiences, but all our observations are already theory-laden. While this is true, it is also true that theory does not totally determine our vision; and clever experimenters can often, I believe, devise tests that can differentiate between paradigms to most practitioners’ satisfaction. Nevertheless, as both Kuhn and Popper would admit, the decision to abandon one theory for another can never be a wholly rational affair, since there is no way of telling whether the old paradigm could, with sufficient ingenuity, be made to accommodate the anomalous data; and in any case a strange phenomena can always be tabled as a perplexing but unimportant deviation for future researchers to tackle. This is how an Aristotelian would view Galileo’s pendulum, I believe. Yet this fact—that there can be no objective, fool-proof criteria for switching paradigms—is no reason to despair. We are not prophets; every decision we take involves risk that it will not pan out; and in this respect science is no different. What makes science special is not that it is purely rational or wholly objective, but that our guesses are systematically checked against our experience and debated within a community of dedicated inquirers. All knowledge contains an imaginative and thus an arbitrary element; but this does not mean that anything goes. To use a comparison, a painter working on a portrait will have to make innumerable little decisions during her work; and yet—provided the painter is working within a tradition that values literal realism—her work will be judged, not for the taste displayed, but for the perceived accuracy. Just so, science is not different from other cultural realms in lacking arbitrary elements, but in the shared values that determine how the final result is judged. I think that Kuhn would assent to this; and I think it was only the widespread belief that science was as objective, asocial, and unimaginative as a camera taking a photograph that led him to emphasize the social and arbitrary aspects of science so strongly. This is why, contrary to his expectations, so many people read his work as advocating total relativism. It should be said, however, that Kuhn’s position does alter how we normally think of “truth.” In this I also find him strikingly close to his reputed nemesis, Popper. For here is the Austrian philosopher on the quest for truth: Science never pursues the illusory aim of making its answers final, or even probable. Its advance is, rather, towards the infinite yet attainable aim of ever discovering new, deeper, and more general problems, and of subjecting its ever tentative answers to ever renewed and ever more rigorous tests. And here is what his American counterpart has to say: Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist’s position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress. Here is another juxtaposition. Popper says: Science is not a system of certain, or well-established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality. Our science is not knowledge (episteme): it can never claim to have attained truth, or even a substitute for it, such as probability. … We do not know: we can only guess. And our guesses are guided by the unscientific, the metaphysical (though biologically explicable) faith in laws, in regularities which we can uncover—discover. And Kuhn: One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth… Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth’ for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its ‘real’ counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Though there are important differences, to me it is striking how similar their accounts of scientific progress are: the ever-increasing expansion of problems, or puzzles, that the scientist may investigate. And both thinkers are careful to point out that this expansion cannot be understood as an approach towards an ultimate “true” explanation of everything, and I think their reasons for saying so are related. For since Popper begins with theories, and Kuhn with paradigms—both of which stem from the imagination of scientists—their accounts of knowledge can never be wholly “objective,” but must contain an aforementioned arbitrary element. This necessarily leaves open the possibility that an incompatible theory may yet do an equal or better job in making sense of an observation, or that a heretofore undiscovered phenomenon may violate the theory. And this being so, we can never say that we have reached an “ultimate” explanation, where our theory can be taken as a perfect mirror of reality. I do not think this notion jeopardizes the scientific enterprise. To the contrary, I think that science is distinguished from older, metaphysical sorts of enquiry in that it is always open-ended, and makes no claim to possessing absolute “truth.” It is this very corrigibility of science that is its strength. This review has already gone on for far too long, and much of it has been spent riding my own hobby-horse without evaluating the book. Yet I think it is a testament to Kuhn’s work that it is still so rich and suggestive, even after many of its insights have been absorbed into the culture. Though I have tried to defend Kuhn from accusations of relativism or undermining science, anyone must admit that this book has many flaws. One is Kuhn’s firm line between “normal” science and paradigm shifts. In his model, the first consists of mere puzzle-solving while the second involves a radical break with the past. But I think experience does not bear out this hard dichotomy; discoveries and innovations may be revolutionary to different degrees, which I think undermines Kuhn’s picture of science evolving as a punctuated equilibrium. Another weakness of Kuhn’s work is that it does not do justice to the way that empirical discoveries may cause unanticipated theoretical revolutions. In his model, major theoretical innovations are the products of brilliant practitioners who see the field in a new way. But this does not accurately describe what happened when, say, DNA was discovered. Watson and Crick worked within the known chemical paradigm, and operated like proper Popperians in brainstorming and eliminating possibilities based on the evidence. And yet the discovery of DNA’s double helix, while not overturning any major theoretical paradigms, nevertheless had such far-reaching implications that it caused a revolution in the field. Kuhn has little to say about events like this, which shows that his model is overly simplistic. I must end here, after thrashing about ineffectually in multiple disciples in which I am not even the rankest amateur. What I hoped to re-capture in this review was the intellectual excitement I felt while reading this little volume. In somewhat dry (though not technical) academic prose, Kuhn caused a revolution still forceful enough to make me dizzy. August 27, 2010 Remember your 10th grade Geometry class? It was a 55 minute class just before lunch. Picture yourself, 15 years old, Friday, ensconced in Geometry on a beautiful late September day. If you’re a girl, you’re much more interested in whether the new boy is going to sit with Amber during lunch for a third day in a row, and what he’s going to say to her this time; he’s so confident and handsome. If you’re a guy, you’re much more interested in the 17 year old Varsity cheerleader at the front of your class, in uniform, school particolors pleated in the skirt, which is caught in a chair rivet and pulling the material agonizingly close to the lace edge of her panty, which you hope is vivid monochrome pink. Now imagine your eremitic teacher with Asperger’s syndrome intruding on those daydreams with a methodical, laborious, sterile mathematical proof. At the chalkboard, in mind-numbing detail, in plodding repetition, with no class participation, the teacher steps through the proof which begins by repeating the same several transitive properties by which all geometric proofs begin. Despite the fantastic universe of 3-dimensional rotation and neato equations to find volume, geometry is rendered lifeless on the chalkboard by these relentless proofs. This, then, is the tone of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions--from beginning to end--by Thomas Kuhn. This is great material, just like geometry, but the narrative is like reading a proof that takes up 3 pages in your spiral notebook or Trapper Keeper. Kuhn received a B.S., an M.S., and a PhD in physics from Harvard U. As a Harvard Fellow, he experienced an epiphany, and changed his life focus to the philosophy of Science. He subsequently taught philosophy at Berkley and MIT. Kuhn does not lack credibility. His ideas are provocative. However, his writing lacks verve, vim and vigor. Like a geometry proof, and so characteristic of a mathematician, Kuhn belabors his points with structured, routinized precision that keeps the subject firmly grounded, and, as a result, narratively flat. There’s great, thoughtful, and comprehensive support for his thesis, but like a proof, he is so exact that each subsequent sentence restates about half of the previous sentence, and each subsequent paragraph reconsiders half the previous paragraph. Each subsequent chapter starts somewhat like, “as stated in the previous chapter we now know X, Y and Z; we can summarized X, Y and Z as &c, &c, &c; we can therefore move to the idea that &c, &c, &c.” Just like a mathematical proof--in gory detail. This non-fiction creeps along at parking lot speeds of 5 mph. But this is an instructive book nevertheless. It’s an essential 4- to 5-star read for mathematicians, physicists, and engineers--really any practitioners of the ‘hard’ sciences. Written in 1961, the scientific revolutions that Kuhn outlines are no less relevant today than at publication. He leans heavily on major revolutions of the past, conceding that sometimes several generations need to pass before the proper perspective can be achieved in science, or what Kuhn declares as ‘mature science.’ So, he defines, characterizes, and compares revolutions in math (Aristarchus, Newton, Descartes) and physics (Copernicus, Kepler, Planck, Einstein) and astronomy (Ptolemy, Brahe, Galileo) and motion (Aristotle, Archimedes) and electromagnetism (Franklin, Leyden, Coulumb, Joule) and chemistry (Lavoisier, Boyle, Dalton, Kelvin). It’s important for theoretical problem-solvers and lay practitioners alike to read in methodical detail what might seem at first intuitive, but over the course of 210 pages, develops into a compelling analysis of attributes that all scientific revolutions display, and, going forward, what attributes that future scientific revolutions might project. I'm not a scientist. 3 stars. January 8, 2011 Let’s start elsewhere. Watch this and then we can talk paradigms: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qc... Now, I don’t normally do that – nor do I like to talk about optical illusions. I generally think illusions mean quite other things to what most people like to say they mean. I find that people tend to say the most boringly predictable things about optical illusions. That is a large part of the source of my aversion to them, like Pavlov’s dogs, I have been taught to cringe at the first sight of the drawing that is a witch/young woman or a rabbit/duck. And let’s not mention poor old Escher – if he only knew the bollocks that is spoken with one of his drawings Power Pointed onto a screen behind a hundred thousand ‘motivational’ speakers… Can it really be all that hard to understand that there are paradoxes involved when you represent a three-dimensional object in two-dimensional space? This really isn’t something of the deep psychological significance some people seem to think it is and it certainly doesn’t prove that we ‘all see things differently’ – in fact, given these are standard optical illusions ought to be enough to prove we all see the world more or less the same. What is interesting in the ‘watch the white team’ exercise above is that getting us to focus our attention on the white team means we miss entirely anything going on with the black team – even when one of the black team become a moon walking bear. A friend of mine was so convinced she could not miss something so obvious as a moonwalking bear that she thought somehow the computer knew she had already seen it and therefore always showed the version with the bear in it, at least after that very first time she watched it, which clearly had had no such thing. A lot of this book is about how people can look at the same thing and yet not see the same things. Kuhn’s says that there are two kinds of science – normal science, which you can think of by way of the lovely metaphor of accretion (facts get added to science in much the same way that layers of barnacles get added to a boat). And then there is revolutionary science – when all of the world changes, when no further facts may have been added, but all is different anyway: as when Copernicus placed the sun in the middle of the solar system or Einstein curved space to explain gravity. Notice that both normal and revolutionary science imply progress. For Kuhn the difference between the two types of science isn’t ‘progress’ – all science is about that – but about the mental framework from within which we work when we are doing one or the other. Mostly, and most scientists, do ‘normal science’ most of the time. Sometimes people put out books with titles like ‘the 101 words or ideas you need to know to be considered scientifically aware’ – Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shifts would pretty well have make it onto one of those list like books: alongside the Turing test, Mr Schrodinger's cat and the uncertainty principle, I guess. A paradigm is a fundamental way of viewing the world. It is more than a theory, but literally a way of understanding. Better to think of it on the scale of a worldview – Dawkins and Creationists have separate paradigms. A lot of this comes from Kantian philosophy – and if I was to blame anyone for Kuhn, Kant would be the person I would turn to. Kant said that we can not know the world as it is in-itself. We can only understand the world as humans, with our limited human faculties. Is the ‘human’ way of understanding the world how the world should be understood? For Kant that question doesn’t really make sense (how would we ever know otherwise?) This is the subjectivism of Kantian philosophy – we might not know the world as it is in itself (how it is objectively) but we can come to understand the world partially and subjectively through our limited and even potentially distorting senses (was that a witch or a pretty young woman you drew for me?) Now, this is where people go off half-cocked and say that there is no meaning in the universe and that all that exists is our interpretation - the glorious appeal of solipsism to undergraduate philosophy students (with our thoughts we make the world) and other such nonsense. When I first read Kuhn I assumed that this was, fundamentally or finally, what he was saying. I still think subjectivism is large part of what he is saying (despite his spending pages and pages in the postscript trying to convince me otherwise), but I don't think he is saying either that the world outside our senses does not exist or that the universe is fundamentally meaningless. The best way to understand a paradigm shift is to work through an example of one. Perhaps an equally good way is to think about how your view of the world changed once you stopped counting passes made by the white team and noticed the dancing bear. Before Copernicus, people thought the earth was at the centre of the universe. Everything else revolved around us: the stars, the planets, the moon. After Copernicus the earth went from the centre of the universe to a place infinitely less significant, just another lump of rock forever falling towards a third-rate star and forever missing it around and around again. The change in perspective involved in this change of view can only be described as a revolution – not only in how we understood how the heavens work, but also how society worked when Copernicus was alive and how religion worked and so much else as well. The previous paradigm of science, one fitting epicycles into the orbits to account for odd observations like the backward progressions of planets, for example, suddenly seemed no longer necessary to people who accepted the new world view. But then, the problem was that not only were epicycles no long necessary, but perhaps neither were the strict Medieval social structures of kings and bishops and barons and peasants each in their separate and fixed spheres. Kuhn asks if two people (one holding the Ptolemaic view of the heavens and the other the Copernican) were to sit down beside an open fire with a glass of wine to chat about the skies, would they actually be talking about the same things? His answer is that what they would have to say to each other would be incommensurable. That is, what they would say might as well be said in two different and untranslatable languages. For example – to the Ptolemaic astronomer the sun is another, though special, planet – the word planet is from Greek and means wanderer. To the old astronomy the sun wanders across the sky and so is a planet. To the Copernican the sun is fixed and the planets and comets move around it. So, when they talk each to the other about the sun are they really talking about the same thing? Kahn says that in a sense they are - and this is how he tries to escape the charge of subjectivism – but that this is only true in that the light from the sun falls upon both observers equally. However, in looking at the sun from their separate paradigms it is hardly surprising they seem to be talking across each other, at cross purposes and worse, when they try to describe what they see. Our choice of paradigm is not simply a matter of us matching our theories to the world with increasing precision. Firstly, it took a very long time for the Copernican system to show itself superior to the Ptolemaic in predicting where planets and stars might be at any given time. You have to remember that placing the sun at the centre was only part of the solution – we also needed to understand that the orbits weren’t perfect circles and so much else struggled and teased from the heavens by Galileo, Kepler, Newton and others. Kuhn argues that the difference between how successfully the Copernican view made predictions over the Ptolemaic wasn’t really the thing that tipped things in its favour. But rather other criteria, like overall ‘simplicity’ of the theory and its ‘beauty’ where at least as important. Paradigm shifts are not important for the old questions they help to answer, but rather for the new questions they allow us to ask. They allow us to go back to normal science, but now in a way that directs our attention away from counting basketball passes and toward the moondancing bear. I think I was probably harder on Kuhn when I first read him than I am now. However, I still think incommensurable is far too strong a word. I think people can understand and still disagree – and that this isn’t really about misunderstanding. Sometimes we disagree because we understand too well. And I do think Kantian subjectivity is a large part of Kuhn’s theory and, in fact, that Kuhn goes even further than Kant did (at least Kant believed all humans had the same faculties, and therefore all saw the world in much the same way – Kuhn certainly does not agree with that). The other problem I have with this theory is that I constantly come back to the ‘so what’ test. I think it would be very hard to argue that we don’t see the world differently post-Einstein than we did under the classical world view of Newton. And that such a shift in perspective could not be anticipated prior to the shift and that those pre and post shift do see the world in quite different ways – but who could really argue otherwise? Newton’s absolute space and Einstein’s curved spacetime are like night and day in many ways. But even Newton knew there was a hole a mile wide in his theory of the universe. Not having any idea of what gravity was and only being able to describe how it worked annoyed him all of his life. Gravity could not be explained by Newtonian physics – so if there was ever to be an explanation then something had to change. Books like 13 Things That Don't Make Sense, I think, put this book into a new perspective. We are much more likely to hope for paradigm changes today, I think. For example, people both hope for evidence in support of and against string theory – one way or another, a new paradigm will be born. And what if we never find the Higgs Boson? The standard model will suddenly become somewhat non-standard. I think the current groping for new paradigms, particularly in physics, is interesting and quite different from what I take to be the meaning of Kuhn’s theory. To Kuhn, all science is normative – perhaps today that is less true of the outer limits of physics where quarks meet strings. The other ‘so what test’ is to ask if scientists on the ground use Kuhn’s theory as a why to help them either do normal science or map a path towards or through scientific revolutions? I would suspect this would be more likely to be the case in the social sciences – perhaps where notions like paradigm shifts really do mean something much more akin to worldviews. All the same, most of what I have read of science and scientists is that they are not terribly interested in philosophy (at least, those who are not outright contemptuous of it). Paradigm shifts, according to Kuhn, are for the young and often only succeed when the dead have died off. That is, paradigm shifts are for those not too deeply indoctrinated in the old paradigm. I think this is less true today – you don’t need to be a child any longer to win a Nobel Prize; in fact, the average age of winners increased throughout the whole of last century. The kinds of people who show optical illusions as part of their endlessly boring Power Point presentations are also the kinds of people who talk about paradigm shifts and quantum leaps. In science these phrases mean pretty well the exact opposite to what they generally mean in general chitchat. A quantum leap isn’t an earth shattering leap forward, but about the smallest change in state possible – a paradigm shift is closer in meaning to what is generally implied by quantum leap, a complete change in your view of the universe. Mostly, the kinds of people who talk of paradigm shifts, mean something as significant as a new wrapper on a chocolate bar. So, it is not only poor Mr Escher we need to consider being unintentionally abused by the ignorance of PowerPoint Presenters, but poor old Kuhn too. April 29, 2019 لذت بردم از کتاب وقتی با استدلال‌های پشتوانه‌دارِ کوهن مواجه می‌شدم و هوشش در پیش‌بینی‌کردن سوالاتی که در همان لحظه ذهن مخاطب را درگیر کرده بود. تاکید اصلی کوهن بر این است که در کتاب‌های درسی به ما یاد داده‌اند که علم کم‌کم روی هم انباشته شده، اما چنین نیست. پارادایم فعلی سوال‌هایی می‌پرسد که برای پارادایم قبلی بی‌معنا بوده و بالعکس؛ بنابراین ارائه‌ی روایت «امروزی» از تاریخ علم نوعی مصادره به مطلوب است. علم با انقلاباتی که پارادایم قبلی را به‌کل طرد کردند پیشرفت کرده است؛ پیشرفتی که ابدا به معنای نزدیک‌شدن به حقیقت نیست. March 7, 2009 Within this book, a 15-page essay somehow gets crammed into 174 tedious pages and crowned by a lengthy 35-page postscript. In its chapters Kuhn, father of the expression “paradigm shift,” shows us how science advances in spasmodic fractures that shatter previous models of nature. But at 210 pages, mission creep sinks in. The book does more than propose a new model of scientific progress. It also tells us why other models are mistaken. Kuhn refutes the correspondence theory of truth, logical positivism, and falsification as arbiters of scientific progress. What’s left is a relativistic notion of science as one endeavor among many, a craft whose rules are decided by its practitioners with no particular reference to the outside world. A new paradigm, Kuhn tells us, gets scientists no closer to any external reality than its predecessor. I found the discussion of paradigm shifts less convincing than I had expected. But what really turned me off about this essay was its style. The author continually stresses that a “paradigm” may not be treated as pop culture. Expounding this aversion to popular science, Kuhn notes that scientists engaging in science writing for public consumption are no doubt on the downslopes of their careers. He then tortures the text as if to avoid his own judgment. The author uses a public venue, a book for general publication, to address the scientific community in a professional capacity. But this book isn’t science. It’s history and philosophy as they apply to this field. The author nevertheless unpacks the theme as if were a kind of hard science, or at least an abstruse academic paper. Ignoring the scope that history and philosophy allow writers, the author's writing instead becomes dense, annoying, elitist and even rude. Kuhn's thesis doesn’t warrant such an attitude. His ideas are interesting, but his ponderous execution confuses bad table manners with succinct scholarship. May 12, 2019 When this book came out fifty years ago it changed the terms of the debate about what scientific progress meant. Using multiple historical examples, and drawing on his own extensive research into the history of science, Thomas Kuhn developed an intellectual framework for how science develops, progresses, and changes in response to new paradigms. At the time of his writing the word paradigm was obscure and unknown to most readers, but it has since entered our common vocabulary, and this book is where the phrase “paradigm shift” comes from. Science starts with chaos, with multiple competing theories, each answering different but related questions, none of them providing a focal point for explaining a broad range of phenomena or predicting the outcome of future experiments. Then comes a breakthrough, such as Copernican cosmology, Newtonian mechanics, or John Dalton’s atomic theory of chemistry. Importantly, the new understanding does not answer all the questions within its purview (no theory ever encompasses one hundred percent of possible situations), but it is sufficiently complete and broadly explanatory enough to serve as a theoretical framework on which to build. Some scientists embrace it right away, some are gradually convinced of its appropriateness, and some never come around to the new way of thinking. The author quotes Max Plank who, “surveying his own career, sadly remarked that ‘a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it’”. (150) Then starts the era of normal science, where students are taught the new approach, experiments are conducted which further solidify its position, expand its use, and answer previously unanswerable questions. Kuhn points out two important aspects of this. First, the questions the new paradigm answers are generally applicable only within the new framework. The previous theories answered different questions, and their answers were not necessarily wrong, just inapplicable in the new system, so some things of value from the older understanding were lost. Second, teachers teach and students learn the new way of thinking, which sets boundaries on the kinds of questions they ask, the experiments they perform, and the way they interpret the results. They are not taught to question the paradigm or perform experiments which might invalidate it, so progress, while valuable, stays within the constraints of what is considered possible and appropriate. Eventually gaps are found in the prevailing paradigm and experiments to try to address them only confirm their existence and turn up new problems. The Ptolemaic system was adequate for predicting the positions of stars and planets, but it was never precise. Copernican astronomy was better but still not perfect; Einsteinian theories, accounting for relativity, are even better, but there are always gaps between the predicted and the observed locations. At some point the issues become a major problem for scientists, and as doubts accumulate chaos starts to return as multiple new theories are put forward. Eventually one of them answers most of the questions and becomes the new generally accepted paradigm, and the process starts over again. The other term that this book brought into the common discourse is incommensurability, the idea that the holders of the current paradigms look at the world differently from those of previous paradigms, and many of the questions asked by one theory are out of scope for the others. This is important because we tend to think of science as a steady progression from ignorance to ever greater knowledge, but it is actually more of a step function. Young scientists are taught the current paradigm but the previous ones are thought to be of no importance, superseded by the “right way to do things.” As a result, for all the progress made, we lose something when we become unable to see the world through those different, older lenses of thought. Answers to some questions which seem unsolvable today might be found by looking at the data and asking different questions about it. This book is not casual reading. Kuhn writes in dense academic prose. For example, chapter five begins To discover the relation between rules, paradigms, and normal science, consider first how the historian isolates the particular loci of commitment that have just been described as accepted rules. Close historical investigation of a given specialty at a given time discloses a set of recurrent and quasi-standard illustrations of various theories in their conceptual, observational, and instrumental applications. (43) Nevertheless, this book repays a close reading. Since it first came out it has enjoyed a reputation as an essential reference for scientists and historians of science. It provides a way of thinking about the current state of science, and intriguing ideas about how to enhance and extend the art of the possible, to see the world in ways which are both new and old at the same time, and to answer questions that previously could not even be formulated. September 25, 2016 I can understand why the author thanked his family for their consideration of the author's efforts towards this book, as it must have demanded a lot of painstaking effort not to mention time. I would have given it 3 stars for its complicated way of delivering its points; the language is highly complex that it tends at many certain points throughout, that the arguments contradict each other. Five stars, however for its complexity and taken as a whole it is actually coherent. Like the choice between competing political institutions, that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life. -Thomas Kuhn According to Thomas Kuhn, in science or fields of science, there is a particular paradigm that practitioners adhere to. However, this paradigm at specific points in history, encounter change brought about by new discoveries, anomalies or crises that can disprove it or demand that it be rejected or replaced. In this process, as what this book points out, there are resistances by scientists whether they will discard this paradigm or replace it - and thus, the phenomenon of Paradigm Shift will occur or whether practitioners will stubbornly cling to the original paradigm. No wonder, then, that in the early stages of the development of any science different men confronting the same range of phenomena, but not usually all the same range of phenomena, describe and interpret them in different ways. What is surprising, and perhaps also unique in its degree to the fields we call science, is that such initial divergences should ever largely disappear. For they do disappear to a very considerable extent and then apparently once and for all. Furthermore, their disappearance is usually caused by the triumph of one of the pre-paradigm schools, which, because of its own characteristic beliefs and preconceptions, emphasized only some special part of the two sizable and inchoate pool of information. This historical process is nuanced and subtle because scientists even though they are eager to discover new phenomena on their field or contribute something original - are prone to protecting that particular paradigm that they follow. But crises and anomalies do certainly have to occur and be encountered, thus earlier theories have the potential to be discarded or new theories modified in such a way as to reduce contradictions with earlier theories. For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts' paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of early ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. The gradual process of resistance and/or acceptance is highly nuanced and complex, hence the nature of this book. The presentation of analyses of the author can also be the reason why the book received critical comments particularly by philosophers of science, for instance, there was a comment whether 'he believes in reality?' Towards the end part, there is also the question of the evolution of human knowledge, whether it has a telos or whether, as compared to Dawinian concept, it evolves by itself towards a certain progression of which the goal is unknown. No theory ever solves all the puzzles with which it is confronted at a given time; nor are the solutions already achieved often perfect. On the contrary, it is just the incompleteness and imperfection of the existing data-theory fit that, at any given time, define many of the puzzles that characterize normal science. If any and every failure to fit were ground for theory rejection, all theories ought to be rejected at all times. On the other hand, if only severe failure to fit justifies theory rejection, then the Popperians will require some criterion of "improbability" or of "degree of falsification". In developing one they will almost certainly encounter the same network of difficulties that has haunted the advocates of the various probabilistic verification theories [that the evaluative theory cannot itself be legitimated without appeal to another evaluative theory, leading to regress]. He also contrasted his analyses with Karl Popper's method of falsification and demarcation of knowledge, and stated that this method as espoused by Popper, needs a certain criteria as where to base the falsification of theories, and what qualifies that criteria? Or if that criteria were to be stated, an infinite regress is inevitable. "Truth" is not the criterion of scientific knowledge, because it will have a tendency that once that "Truth" was discovered, that will mean the end of scientific search for knowledge - this is where Kuhn and Popper meet. However, whereas Kuhn would propose the concept of "Paradigm Shift" (he actually used the perceptual psychology concept of "Gestalt" in this sense), Popper proposed the method of falsification of scientific theories. Kuhn's concept can be regarded in the sense, that it is what actually happens in the enterprise of science (it is the actual event), but Popper's falsification even if it is used by practitioners remains an ideal method and the question arises, as to what specific criteria will that 'falsification' be based upon? That will have to be addressed, and I hope will be clarified on my reading of Karl Popper's "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" or "Logik der Forschung". Although both concepts by Kuhn and Popper appear to be antagonistic as written by critics, I'm looking forward that in a way, what they actually proposed as regards their method of inquiry and analysis are reconcilable. February 5, 2016 قراءة أخرى وريفيو مُحدث: ترتكز فلسفة كون حول ما يسمى ب"النموذج الإرشادي" وهو مجموعة المعتقدات والأساليب التي يتبناها المجتمع العلمي في مرحلة ما، وبلوغ نظرية ما مرتبة النموذج الإرشادي يعني أنها أفضل من منافسيها في نظر المجتمع العلمي، وأنها قدمت إجابات على مشاكل لم تستطع سابقتها حلها، واستحدثت وفسرت ظواهر جديدة ما كان بإمكان سابقتها استحداثها. ولكن لا يعني ذلك قدرتها على حل كافة المشاكل، ركز كون صراحةً على الإتفاق المجتمعي. أما بخصوص العلم القياسي، فهو العلم الذي يرتكن على أساس النموذج الإرشادي وينمو بداخله، إنه العلم الذي يؤول الطبيعة وظواهرها داخل إطار يرسمه ويحدده النموذج الإرشادي بواسطة مجموعة من القواعد، ويصر كون على إمكانية نمو العلم القياسي بدون هذه القواعد ولكن ليس بدون نموذج إرشادي، إن المحاولات العلمية القديمة التي لم تكن مؤسسة على نموذج إرشادي واضح يلتف حوله الجميع بدت أشبه بمحاولات فردانية تائهة بين الرد على غيرهم وبين السير قدما، ويستشهد كون بالمحاولات الأولى لتفسير الكهرباء لتوضيح طبيعة العلم في حال غياب نموذج إرشادي، وإن كنا نحن نعلم جيداً أن العلم خلال حقبة الحضارة الإسلامي -باستثناء الفلك- ينطبق عليه ذلك. يواجه العلم القياسي مشاكل، إلا أن طرق حل هذه المشاكل لا تتسم بالإبداع ولا الاستحداث، بل على العكس فالعلماء يحاولون جاهدين إيجاد تفسير لهذه المشكلات بداخل النموذج الإرشادي وقواعده، النموذج الإرشادي يرسم هنا صورة الحلول والحدود التي لا ينبغي تجاوزها، لذلك فإن الحلول المطروحة دوماً ما تتسم بقتل الإبداع والرتابة وأي شذوذ عن النموذج الإرشادي إنما يمثل خطأ العالم، يسمي كون هذه المشاكل بالألغاز وذلك بسبب أن صورة حلها تكون سابقة على محاولة الحل، بل تكون هي غايته، إلا أنه وبالطبع فلن يصمد النموذج الإرشادي أبد الدهر، حيث سنصل لبعض المشكلات المستعصية على النموذج الإرشادي، ولا يتم ببساطة التخلي عن النموذج الإرشادي بل يتم تدعيمه بكافة الوسائل. وهذه المرحلة التي تسمى بمرحلة الأزمات تشبه إلى حد ما مرحلة ما قبل النموذج الإرشادي حيث تخرج العديد والعديد من النظريات المتنافسة لتحل محل النموذج الإرشادي القديم، وغالباً ما يكون دعاة النموذج الإرشادي الجديد من الشباب والمحدثين ممن لم يتشربوا النموذج الإرشادي القديم، وهو ما يتفق مع فكرة كون عن إرساء تطور العلم على أسس سوسيولوجية وسيكولوجية. يختلف كون عن بوبر وعن الوضعيين في رؤيته لموضوع التحقق من النظريات وطبيعة العلم القياسي حيث يراه كون ينمو بداخل النموذج الإرشادي ولا يحاول تكذيبه حتى تظهر الأزمات والثورة العلمية فيتبدل النموذج الإرشادي، في حين يرى بوبر أن كل كشف علمي ثورة تكذب ما قبلها، وهو حقيقةً ما تكذبه الوقائع التاريخية التي تسلح بها كون ببراعة ويرى كون أيضًا صعوبة تكذيب نظرية ما بشكل قاطع. ولا يحاول العلم القياسي مطابقة نتائجه بالواقع كما ادعت الوضعية ولو حتى بشكل احتمالي بل مطابقتها مع مباديء النموذج الإرشادي، يشبه كون التحقق الإحتمالي بالانتخاب الطبيعي الذي ينتقي الأفضل بحسب بيانات وظروف معينة، وليس الأفضل عامة، ويدعي كون أن التحقق الإحتمالي والتكذيب يتجليان في عمليتي الأزمات والثورة. تمثل الثورة عند كون تغييرا في النظرة إلى العالم، فالباحث لا يزال يرى العالم بعد وقبل الثورة العلمية كما هو، إن الثورة عند كون تؤدي لتغيير في المعطيات الحسية نفسها وليست في طرق معالجتها، وقد استشهد بإمكانية ذلك ببعض التجارب الجشطالتية والنفسية، يقول كون بأن النماذج الإرشادية تستخدم مصطلحات مختلفة وتحاكي عوالم مختلفة بالتالي فإن تلك النماذج الإرشادية غير قابلة للقياس على بعضها البعض، وحتى إن اهتمت بنفس المصطلحات والأمور فإنها أيضاً تنظر إليها من منظور مختلف، فكتلة آينشتاين ليست ذات كتلة نيوتن نفسها، بالتالي فالحوار المتكافيء بين نموذجين إرشاديين مختلفين هو لغو. تعرض وجهة نظر كون تاريخ التطور العلمي بأنه تاريخ التحولات بين النماذج الإرشادية، وليس تاريخ التقدم المطرد، فالتقدم لا يحدث إلا داخل النموذج الإرشادي الواحد تحت اسم العلم القياسي، بينما يعلم الجميع أن الوجهة العامة هي وجهة النظر التي تنادي بالتقدم المطرد والاقتراب من الحقيقة التي تبدو وكأنها المطابقة مع الواقع، إلا أن آراء كون تخالف ذلك. ويعرض كون الأسباب متمثلة في سلطة الكتب الدراسية من إخفاء الطابع الثوري والتاريخي للعلم ويطرح كون تساؤلا هاما طالما طرحته، لماذا يظهر التقدم في العلم ولا يظهر في سواه من النشاطات البشرية؟ إن ذلك يبدو بسبب تماسك المجتمع العلمي وتسليمه بالنموذج الإرشادي حيث يبدو التبدل في النموذج الإرشادي وكأنه تقدم مطرد، بينما تبقي النشاطات الأخرى على نماذجها الإرشادية القديمة. July 28, 2008 I first read Kuhn's book during my first year as a Ph.D. student, and found it rather interesting. It challenges notions of scientific progress as liner by suggesting instead a process of "paradigm shift." Essentially, Kuhn argues that researchers in a branch of science accept as normal a set of "received beliefs" that guide and bound their investigations into new phenomena. Because of this set of accepted beliefs and assumptions, new ways of looking at the world are often suppressed or ignored. Thus, even when presented with anomalous results, researchers often knowingly or unknowingly attempt to force-fit them to the preconceived structure they have embraced. This continues until a paradigm-busting shift occurs -- a scientific revolution -- that (generally abruptly) takes the field in a new direction. Understandably, not all scientific revolutions are successful in bringing about a paradigm shift. The ideas expressed in this book are provactive, even compelling, and have come back to me often in the 25 years since I read it in the form of questions and thoughts about potential paradigm shifts that may be overdue. It5 one that is worth reading for most people, and the scientific branches affected by it are not limited to the "hard sciences." Politics, psychology, sociology, cultural change, religious thought, and many other scientific domains can be profitably viewed through the lens of Kuhn's work. Read March 12, 2023 “Стваралачки научници морају, као и уметници, повремено да буду у стању да живе у једном ишчашеном свету[.]” Штиво важно за филозофију науке, његов дух и данас лебди, посебно пријемчив физичарима јер су једине евиденције које Кун пружа примери из историје физике; управо ова фактографска шкртост, а у корист неколико илустративних (и за биолога давешких) примера, сама по себи је довољна да се тексту не приступа као каменорезачкој делатности. Карл Попер инсистирао је на оповргљивости, сматрајући да је довољан један круцијални опит да се теорија сруши. Истина, тестирањем хипотезе изналазе се подаци који је никада не могу потврдити, већ се само може констатовати да су резултати огледа у складу са доступним теоријским подацима. Ово не значи да је наука необјективна и нерационална, али нам сугерише да не постоји ултимативна, монолитна истина ка којој се тежи. Томас Кун и сам наглашава да се наука не креће ка било каквом циљу, како се погрешно изводи из заблуде о телеолошком карактеру природне еволуције. Парадигма, везивно ткиво једног научног домена, уврежени скуп теорија, уверења и техника у оквиру кога функционишу чланови једне научне заједнице, омогућава успешно решавање загонетки, односно проблема са осигураним постојањем решења под одређеним правилима. Ова научна пракса под окриљем парадигме назива се нормалном науком и најчешће има кумулативни карактер – увећава сазнајни корпус. Криза у рају ушушканих научника наступа услед нагомилавања неправилности (аномалија) које дата парадигма не може да објасни. Научници гурају проблеме под тепих, чешу се по глави, смишљају ad hoc модификације постојећих теорија и/или игноришу и крију искрсавајуће неправилности како би наставили прихватљиво да објашњавају и интерпретирају своје податке. Криза се не може вечно занемаривати; све већи број научника наилази на неправилности, освешћује се разједање везивног ткива научне праксе и долази до научне револуције. Колеге се такмиче, ривалске парадигме сукобљавају и полако се прелази на ону парадигму која најуспешније решава постојеће загонетке. Кун овде не види кумулацију, него пре рез, промену гешталта када научник дословно види свет другим очима. Овај прелаз није лак, научници се чврсто држе старе парадигме, а неки доживе и крах, напуштајући професију. Прешалтавају се најчешће млађи припадници научне заједнице, неиндоктринирани (барем не тако дуго), понекад као нова крв n-те генерације од кризе. Кун наглашава да научно истраживање може да постоји и без парадигми, да нова парадигма није свемогућа (не може све да објасни) нити успешнија, али може бити виђена као естетски привлачнија, складнија. Њен квалитет лежи у степену осетљивости за неправилности као увод у сопствену смрт кроз кризу. Али ни криза се не мора завршити револуцијом, а револуција може имати и регресивни карактер. Кун је довео у питање и разлике између контекста открића (чињеничних новитета) и контекста оправдања/смишљања (теоријских новитета, њихове валидације): временска дистинкција; процес (откриће) наспрам методе (валидација), емпиријска vs логичка анализа. [Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. "Context of discovery versus context of justification and Thomas Kuhn." Revisiting discovery and justification: Historical and philosophical perspectives on the context distinction (2006): 119-131.] Изложене идеје могу се пресликати и на друштвене науке које за разлику од природних немају законе, већ пре уочавају (не)правилности. Биологија је овде на размеђи – иако природна, она нема законе; живи свет супервенира на законима физике и хемије и ихерентно је емергентан (целина се не може објаснити скупом својих делова – биологија је несводива на хемију, а ова на физику – промене у нижим ступњевима организације живог света утичу на више, али се процеси попут динамике популације, митозе или дигестије не могу објаснити позивањем на квантна стања). Савремени биолози суочени су са огромним притиском – академска инфлација повлачи хиперпродукцију, што је обрнуто пропорционално квалитету. Биоцентрична струја отежава рад са задовољавајућим бројем животиња које морају да се изналазе испод жита. Овај проблем величине узорка, нарочито када су предмет проучавања људска ткива, повлачи за собом нерепродуцибилност научних резултата, што их аутоматски дискредитује. Истраживачки тим који жели да искуша парадигму бива подвргнут сумњичењу и ригорозној провери валидности резултата и може му се приступити са одређеним степеном поверења ако је резултате објавио у часопису какав је Nature. Будући да је биологија у јеку развоја, из ђубрета испливавају драгоцени подаци који у збиру мењају гешталт. Од микроеволуције, преко открића ДНК, секвенцирања генома и отварања црне кутије, до макроеволуције, меког наслеђивања, механизама интраћелијске, међућелијске и интерспецијске комуникације, од оксидативног стреса до редокс пејзажа, од пирамиде, преко дрвета, до мреже живота…биологија живи. 💚 Захвалност за читање ове књиге дугујем др Еви Камерер која нам је држала предавања из епистемологије пре три године, а прошлог месеца смо имали прилику да је чујемо на обележавању Дарвиновог дана (истина, за bloody valentine) и десио се – земљотрес! Како и не би када говори филозофкиња и филолошкиња по образовању са тако добрим познавањем биологије. Сигуран сам да би др Камерер маестралан приказ написала, баш као што је о Куну и говорила. Надам се да они који су стигли до краја ових редова нису разочарани мојом супституцијом. September 28, 2021 There are some people in the history of thought, great thinkers in most cases, who nonetheless become known primarily for one book, or even just one idea. It's no great disgrace; Copernicus had only one significant publication. Being a "one-hit wonder" still makes you a wonder. In the case of Thomas Kuhn, his magnum opus is probably a two word phrase: "paradigm shift" If you have never heard it, well, what are you doing on Goodreads? But in the off chance that you're just new to the English language or something, wiktionary.org defines "paradigm shift" as: 1. A radical change in thinking from an accepted point of view to a new one, necessitated when new scientific discoveries produce anomalies in the current paradigm. 2. (US) A radical change in thinking from an accepted point of view to a new belief. I didn't know, until now, that the second sense was a US-specific meaning; I invite any non-US readers of this review to fact-check this for me. It is not a bad definition, but it leaves a lot out of Kuhn's concept. In this book, he is attempting nothing less than a redefinition of how it is that science works, and with it also offering an hypothesis as to why it works as well as it does. A paradigm, as he uses the term, is a mental framework that addresses problems such as: - what questions are askable, and what is to be regarded as axiomatic - the precise meaning of terms (e.g. "space" and "time" in Newtonian and relativistic physics are not referring to precisely the same thing) - objectives for what kinds of questions need answering (e.g. "what elements exist?", "how many dimensions are there?", "how closely related are different species?") - methods, techniques, even instruments for answering such questions The interesting thing about this, is the assertion that when different scientists in a field hold different paradigms, they may find it impossible to settle their dispute by objective tests. If you do not agree on what questions are answerable, or most important, or even what precisely the words you are using to frame the questions mean, then you may just talk past each other. The supporters of the new paradigm are essentially asking their peers to learn a new language, or a new profession. Unless the old paradigm is facing a crisis of some sort, this is virtually guaranteed to fail. This is interesting, not least because it is not how we are told that science works, probably not even how scientists themselves believe science works (which does not necessarily mean that it isn't in fact how science does work). It posits that there are two distinctly different kinds of phases for a scientific field to be in: normal science (sometimes called "puzzle-solving"), and crisis. The examples he uses most often for new paradigms are Lavoisier (replacement of the "phlogiston" paradigm by the concept of oxygen as the source of combustion), Ben Franklin (corpuscular electricity), Newton, Einstein, and Copernicus. He does also, however, make a reference or two to the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, including in the final chapter of the book (a blockbuster finale which I will not attempt to summarize). Kuhn was apparently accused by some of portraying science as an entirely subjective enterprise, but he's not really (in my opinion, or his). Rather, he is saying something rather deep and important about how the minds of scientists work, and about how the community of scientists in any given specialty work. They are, in affect, creating a language, and a culture. These are both inherently social enterprises, and cannot survive and thrive in a single mind, however talented. The presence of a crisis of some sort may present an opportunity for a new paradigm to arise; if a new challenge to string theory were to appear, I suspect that there would be physicists prepared to consider it. But, just as no one will decide to learn your new logical, invented language just because maybe it would result in some wonderful poetry some day, a new paradigm does not arise in a scientific field unless the old one is in a state of crisis. Thus, according to Kuhn, the evolution of science is not by a steady (or even unsteady) series of advances, but rather in a cycle of: 1) puzzle-solving, using the existing paradigm to make solid but non-revolutionary advances 2) crisis, in which the existing paradigm is found unable to provide a satisfactory solution to a problem that it finds important 3) the arising of an alternative paradigm, which addresses the crisis (or at least seems more promising in being able to eventually) 4) paradigm shift, often (but not necessarily) by generational replacement, as younger scientists are less invested in the incumbent paradigm Is it all true? Who knows? I don't have the history-of-science chops to evaluate it. One thing is certain, though: I will ponder this way of thinking about thinking, for some time to come. September 15, 2008 Bit of a preface: I hated this book. It contains some really good ideas, which are totally worth discussing, but the whole thing is so much wordier and denser than it needs to be (this, coming from me!); seriously, the ideas put forth in this 200-page monstrosity would have been better shared in a 5-10 page article. Still, we were assigned to read it for LIS 2000, Understanding Information, and asked to write a 400-word review, describing "how the content of this book relates to the information professions. Why do you think this is assigned reading?" followed by a 250-word addendum, restating our opinion and describing how it had changed in reading the other students' essays, so I tried my best to get through it. Although I'm a little embarrassed to post this--and nervous that people who already took the class will say "No! You are so wrong! You'll see!"--I still think it might be useful to do so. I can't change my answer now (or, well, not after 11pm--but I promise not to, now that I've made this public), so I'm curious what people who've been through this hazing ritualbook have to say. When we were assigned Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and asked to define its relevance to the information professions, I falsely assumed my professors were implying that our field is undergoing a "paradigm shift." Certainly, that argument can be made: With the Internet making information simultaneously more plentiful and harder to find, the effectiveness of distributed tagging and its effects on discussion of cataloguing, and the popularity of digital libraries and plans for automation thereof, nobody would seriously assert that our field is in any way stagnant or unchanging. On the other hand, paradigms point to fundamental thought patterns, and to suggest that our "paradigm" is in flux seems questionable: We still believe that information should be freely available to all, and we still strive to provide it in the best way available to us; that, I claim, is our true paradigm. That we have one at all shows the applicability of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; certainly, we make assumptions about the world and about information, and we consider questions relevant or irrelevant based on those assumptions. Just as scientists are not the impartial observers that we are told they should be, we are not the impartial information providers that we would like to be. Although Kuhn has many interesting and widely applicable ideas, I do not agree that his is the best way to think about science and progress. Certainly, the book has its fans (London 2008), but I was pleased to see that I was not its only doubter: Weinberg (1998), for instance, disagrees with nearly all of Kuhn's central assertions. I do not go quite so far. As a scientist, I believe that science, taken as a whole, does progress with time--to argue that our understanding of the universe today is not fuller than it was 200 years ago seems ludicrous--but we should be cautious in treating any one scientific finding or theory as "progress," in and of itself: First, a scientist's paradigm and her puzzle-solving nature restrict what questions she considers asking (p. 37), and second, the explanations provided by a new theory or paradigm may not be any closer to truth than those of its predecessor (see discussion of opium, p. 104). I think the latter point also applies to the information professions: We may find that any one of the "advancements" we make is really a step back, hampering access to information. ------ With the help of my colleagues' reviews and Dr. Tomer's lecture, my views about Kuhn have changed over the last week. While I stand by my assertion that the information professions, like every field, have sets of accepted viewpoints ("paradigms") at their foundation, I no longer contend that that is Kuhn's sole applicability. Information Science is, after all, not really a science. Rather, I believe that Kuhn's description of incremental advances--and of new paradigms overwriting, if you will, previous work--is relevant to us in our capacity as guardians and gatekeepers of knowledge. A Kuhnian view of progress requires us to remain both vigilant and flexible in our maintenance of the scientific knowledge base; we must catalog the day-to-day work of "normal" knowledge accumulation in every field, particularly science, but we must also be aware that the rules and accepted facts are subject to change. As such, we must struggle to provide the information that daily practitioners of the field will deem relevant, perhaps in addition to previous "advances," or perhaps instead of them. I would add that I do not think we can expect to determine, entirely on our own, precisely which scientific information is worth keeping; as Kuhn says, people outside of a sub-field stand little chance of understanding the literature, and even people inside a field cannot predict with certainty which research direction will lead to a paradigm change. Rather, we should maintain a dialog with the experts and seek to improve our collections in collaboration with them. Kuhn, T.S. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. London, S. (2008). Book Review. Retrieved September 9, 2008, from http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/ku... Weinberg, S. (1998, October 8). The Revolution That Didn't Happen [Review of the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions], The New York Review of Books, pp. 48-52. As a post-script, separate from my review, I feel it necessary to point out that Kuhn would disagree with my assertion that I am a scientist. My formal training was in engineering (p. 30), and I am female. Both seem to count strongly against me, in his estimation. March 14, 2015 Kuhn, a physicist and philosopher and historian of science, wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, producing other editions until his death in 1996. The book was very influential (see description), serving as a starting point for reappraisals within several disciplines. One, psychology, was specifically covered by John Bannon's Philosophy of Psychology class held during the second semester of 1982/83 at Loyola University Chicago. I found the book profoundly stimulating, challenging as it did my rather naive understanding of the physical sciences, and went on to read another book which overtly applied Kuhn's analytic template to psychology. December 19, 2019 10/10. Sixth ever perfect nonfiction rating: 'Structure' is not overrated at all. This is the scientific counterpart to the invaluable work of Alisdair MacIntyre in philosophy. Those works ('After Virtue', 'Whose Justice?', 'Three Rival Versions') are some of the most important for understanding the practice of philosophy and the seemingly-insurmountable aporiae in philosophy and ethics. Kuhn's work does the same for science, is extensible to many other disciplines, and is the only work I'm aware of that gives a partial, though plausible, set of criteria for distinguishing between science (which progresses in regards to its ability to solve puzzles about nature* after consolidation in to one framework of practice per subspecialty, with other agreed-upon frameworks overarching) and everything else (e.g. philosophy, which doesn't seem to progress in a linear fashion, because it has not found a paradigm - those aforementioned aporiae - and is besotted with paradigmatically scientific definitions of progress). On the whole, Kuhn's sketched definition of science does more to solve the demarcation problem than any positivist or ((Popperian)) falsificationist account MacIntyre throws light on Kuhn, Kuhn throws light on MacIntyre. A work by an atheist that may pave the way for my turn to a modified creationism (one which can account for the reality of human biodiversity and group differences unlike typical Hammian young-earth 'creation science': Cavalli-Sforza [in 'The History and Geography of the Human Genome'] estimates that major adaptations can occur in 2,000 years and full speciation in 40,000) from the teleological evolutionism I now believe, and which in any case makes that teleological evolutionism more secure than the adirectional - ironically, for Kuhn argues for
7992	dbpedia	3	52	https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo13179781.html	en	The Structure of Scientific Revolutions	https://tmm.chicagodistr…780226458120.jpg	https://tmm.chicagodistr…780226458120.jpg	[ "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/logo.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/icons/icon-cart.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.imaging/mte/ucp/medium/dam/ucp/books/jacket/978/02/26/45/9780226458113.jpg/jcr:content/9780226458113.jpg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/icons/press-save.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/icons/press-request-copy.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/icons/press-library.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/icons/press-rights-permissions.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/icons/press-back-to-top.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/icons/press-back-to-top.svg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.imaging/mte/ucp/thumbnail/dam/ucp/books/jacket/978/02/26/51/9780226514512.jpg/jcr:content/9780226514512.jpg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.imaging/mte/ucp/thumbnail/dam/ucp/books/jacket/978/02/26/61/9780226618654.jpg/jcr:content/9780226618654.jpg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.imaging/mte/ucp/thumbnail/dam/ucp/books/jacket/978/02/26/24/9780226241364.jpg/jcr:content/9780226241364.jpg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.imaging/mte/ucp/thumbnail/dam/ucp/books/jacket/978/02/26/31/9780226317205.jpg/jcr:content/9780226317205.jpg", "https://press.uchicago.edu/.resources/ucp/img/logo-inverted.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "science", "scientist", "daily life", "books", "reading", "reader", "1960s", "landmark", "history", "philosophy", "philosophical", "famous", "well known", "controversial", "paradigm", "incommensurability", "contemporary", "modern", "linear", "progress", "experimentation", "experiments", "experimental", "data", "revolution", "revolutionary", "biotech", "technology", "background", "context" ]	null	[]	2012-04-18T00:00:00	The book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition, Thomas S. Kuhn is published by University of Chicago Press.	en	/favicon.ico	University of Chicago Press	https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo13179781.html	A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were—and still are. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. Fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn challenged long-standing linear notions of scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don’t arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation but that the revolutions in science, those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of “normal science,” as he called it. Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in our biotech age. This new edition of Kuhn’s essential work in the history of science includes an insightful introduction by Ian Hacking, which clarifies terms popularized by Kuhn, including paradigm and incommensurability, and applies Kuhn’s ideas to the science of today. Usefully keyed to the separate sections of the book, Hacking’s introduction provides important background information as well as a contemporary context. Newly designed, with an expanded index, this edition will be eagerly welcomed by the next generation of readers seeking to understand the history of our perspectives on science.
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"https://pantheon.world/images/logos/logo_CL.svg", "https://pantheon.world/_next/image?url=%2Fimages%2Flogos%2Flogo_creative_commons.png&w=96&q=75 1x, /_next/image?url=%2Fimages%2Flogos%2Flogo_creative_commons.png&w=256&q=75 2x", "https://pantheon.world/images/logos/logo_facebook.svg", "https://pantheon.world/images/logos/logo_twitter.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	/images/favicon.ico		null	Thomas Kuhn Thomas Samuel Kuhn (; 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. Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality . Read more on Wikipedia Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Thomas Kuhn has received more than 1,624,040 page views. His biography is available in 67 different languages on Wikipedia . Thomas Kuhn is the 15th most popular historian (down from 13th in 2019), the 206th most popular biography from United States (down from 140th in 2019) and the most popular American Historian. Kuhn's most famous work is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In this book, Kuhn argues that scientific progress is not linear but rather is characterized by periods of normal science punctuated by revolutions.
7992	dbpedia	3	29	https://history.hanover.edu/hhr/94/hhr94_4.html	en	Thomas Kuhn: Revolution Against Scientific Realism*			[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null	David J. Voelker (21)Progress is a modern notion. Since the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, Westerners have been firm believers in human progress. Only in the twentieth century has the Western attitude of optimism been widely challenged. The major force behind the development of the notion of progress is modern natural science. Scientific progress has traditionally been viewed as a cumulative process. From the origins of modern science in the work of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, until the logical empiricists of the twentieth century, scientific progress has been viewed as an evolutionary process of uncovering truth in the physical world. Underlying this acceptance of the evolutionary progress of science was scientific realism: "the thesis that the objects of scientific knowledge exist and act independently of knowledge of them." [1] They believed that scientific concepts correspond to actual physical "entities and processes. " [2] However, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn relinquished the notion of science as truth-seeking. In place of scientific realism he substituted a non-continuous model of scientific progress that had as its goal efficient puzzle solving. In abandoning the notion that scientists search for truth, Kuhn also abandoned scientific realism, thus challenging a defining characteristic of modern science since the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Modern Science: Realism, Truth, and Evolution Copernicus, with the 1543 publication of On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, laid the foundation for modern science when he propounded that his sun-centered model of the universe explained physical reality. The Aristotelian-Ptolemiac theory dominant at the time, on the other hand, was such a complex system that nobody believed that it corresponded to the physical reality of the universe. Although the Ptolemaic system accounted for observations-"saved the appearances"-its epicycles and deferents were never intended be anything more than a mathematical model to use in predicting the position of heavenly bodies. [3] As historian of science A. Rupert Hall explains, the medieval scientists, like the ancient Greeks from whom they inherited the notion of saving appearances, (22)believed that "mathematical science could not explain things by revealing the structure of reality and its inner logic, it could only give the possibility of predicting future results from stated antecedents." [4] Copernicus found this practice of saving appearances to be "a confession of ignorance and confusion," [5] and instead advocated scientific realism for his system. [6] He believed that the earth really moved. Probably from fear of animosity towards his heliocentric conception of the universe, he did not publish his theory until he neared death; however, his idea of an earth in motion left a legacy of problems-" about the nature of matter, the nature of the planets, the sun, the moon, the stars, and the nature and actions of force in relation to motion"-that would be taken up by later astronomers such as Galileo and Newton. [7] In 1610, the Italian mathematician Galileo published The Starry Messenger, in which he wrote of his support for Copernican astronomy and the telescopic observations that had convinced him to accept the heliocentric model. The reaction to Galileo reveals the strength of the opposition to realism. Many scientists opposed him because they believed that the telescope deceived their eyes, or they did not find the empirical evidence to be relevant. [8] In 1616, the Church added Copernicus's De Revolutionibus to the Index of Forbidden Books, condemning the section where he stated that the motion of the Earth was a physical reality. [9] At that time, Cardinal Bellarmine, representing the Inquisition, informed Galileo that he was free to continue his work with Copernican theory if he agreed that the theory did not describe physical reality but was merely one of the many potential mathematical models. [10] Galileo continued to work, and while he "formally (23)claimed to prove nothing," [11] he passed his mathematical advances and his observational data to Newton, who would not only invent a new mathematics but would solve the remaining problems posed by Copernicus. [12] Newton, with his "Natural Philosophy," proposed a new scientific method. Newton's method consisted of "general induction from phenomena" and resulted in knowledge that was "accurately or very nearly true." [13] Like Copernicus and Galileo, he was a realist and "argued straightforwardly that universal gravity 'really exists."' [14] In his "Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy," he showed his belief that science uncovered physical realities when he insisted that scientists not hypothesize outside the bounds of empirical evidence: "induction may not be evaded by hypotheses." [15] Although he would "frame no hypotheses" [16] about the cause of gravity, because he could make no observations of the cause, he insisted that gravity was a real phenomena and that his laws accurately described the effects of gravity. Thus without pretending that his method could find the underlying causes of things such as gravity, Newton believed that his method produced theory, based upon empirical evidence, that was a close approximation of physical reality. The notion of scientific realism was perhaps crucial to the development of modern science. Medieval science was guided by "logical consistency." [17] In order to move beyond Aristotelian science, the new goal of discovering physical reality was needed. Edward Grant, historian of medieval science, argues that the idea of a "quest for physical reality" was a necessity for a new science to replace Aristotelianism. [18] As historian of eighteenth-century science A. Rupert Hall concludes, the idea of "scientific truth" furnished the "metaphysical substrate"-the intellectual foundation-that produced the scientific revolution. [19] Newtonian science, during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment it helped create, led to the evolutionary notion of progress that permeated the thought of the time and became standard throughout the next century. The Enlightenment view of the universe as a precise machine governed by knowable, absolute laws supported an idea of progress that was continuous and cumulative, (24)with each new piece of knowledge adding to the last; the structures and processes of the physical world could be uncovered by means of observation and reason. Although scientific knowledge was not held to be certain, it was assumed that with each new discovery science moved a step closer to representing accurately physical reality. Scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries inherited both scientific realism and the evolutionary understanding of scientific progress. The logical empiricists of the twentieth century represent the final school of support for scientific realism and the evolutionary development of science. As the name, "logical empiricist" implies, this movement combined induction, based on empiricism, and deduction in the form of logic. Carl Hempel, one of the later advocates of logical empiricism, in Philosophy of Natural Science (1966) argued against those who "deny the existence of 'theoretical entities' or regard theoretical assumptions about them as ingeniously contrived fictions." [20] Although Hempel recognized that many theoretical entities and processes cannot be directly observed (e. g. gravity cannot be observed; only the effects of gravity can be observed), as a scientific realist he believed that a theory well-confirmed by experiment translated to a high probability that the entities and processes of the theory really did exist. Because of his belief in scientific realism, Hempel also believed that science evolved in a continuous manner. New theory did not contradict past theory: "theory does not simply refute the earlier empirical generalizations in its field; rather, it shows that within a certain limited range defined by qualifying conditions, the generalizations hold true in fairly close approximation." [21] New theory is more comprehensive; the old theory can be derived from the newer one and is one special manifestation" [22] of the more comprehensive new theory. The logical empiricists would agree, for instance, that Newtonian physics is a special case of, and can be derived from, Einsteinian physics. The logical empiricist's conception of scientific progress was thus a continuous one; more comprehensive theory replaced compatible, older theory. Each successive theory's explanation was closer to the truth than the theory before. It was the truth, and the prediction and control that came with it, that was the goal of logical-empirical science. The notion of scientific realism held by Newton led to the evolutionary view of the progress of science. The entities and processes of theory were believed to exist in nature, and science should discover those entities and processes. The course of nineteenth- and twentieth-century science eventually threatened the idea of scientific realism. Particularly disturbing discoveries were made in the area of atomic physics. For instance, Heisenberg's indeterminacy (25)principle, according to historian of science Cecil Schneer, yielded the conclusion that "the world of nature is indeterminate. The behavior of the particle is uncertain and therefore the behavior of the atom is an uncertainty." [23] Thus at the atomic level, "even the fundamental principle of causality fail[ed] ." [24] Despite these problems, it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the preservers of the evolutionary idea of scientific progress, the logical empiricists, were seriously challenged. Although Thomas Kuhn was not the first critic of traditional views of science, his work held the most important implications about the rationality of science. [25] Thomas Kuhn: Revolution Against Scientific Realism In 1962 a new historiography-of-science emerged with Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published as part of the "Foundations of the Unity of Science" series. In his book, Kuhn outlined a revolutionary model of scientific change and examined the role of the scientific community in preventing and then accepting change. Kuhn's conception of scientific change occurring through revolutions undermined the traditional scientific goal, finding "truth" in nature. Kuhn's notion of scientific progress rested upon his concept of a paradigm: the common terminology and basic theories of a scientific community and that community's fundamental assumptions about methodology and what questions a scientist can legitimately ask. Textbooks inform scientists-to-be about this common body of knowledge and understanding. Scientific research necessarily takes place within a paradigm, for the world is too huge and complex to be explored randomly. Within a paradigm, a scientist knows what facts are relevant and can build on past research. Those who deviate from the dominant paradigm are not scientists at all; the scientific community considers them to be chasing superstitions. During "normal science," research that occurs within a paradigm, scientists are busy "puzzle solving," an activity conducted to "add to the scope and precision with which the paradigm can be applied." [26] The scientist's research is like solving a puzzle because the scientist, guided by the paradigm, asks questions that can be answered and that have an easily recognizable solution. The paradigm thus shapes both the questions and the answers. (26)Normal science, as defined by Kuhn, is cumulative. New knowledge fills a gap of ignorance. But normal science does not permit for advancement by means of revolutionary theories. As Kuhn pointed out, "one standard product of the scientific enterprise is missing. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none." [27] However, normal science does contain a mechanism that uncovers anomaly, inconsistencies within the paradigm. Because normal science has precision as its goal, it focuses on details; eventually, details arise that are inconsistent with the current paradigm. In most cases, these inconsistencies are eventually resolved or are ignored. However, if the inconsistent details significantly threaten a paradigm, perhaps because they concern a topic of central importance, a crisis occurs and normal science comes to a halt. Such a crisis requires that the scientists re-examine the foundations of their science that they had been taking for granted. During a crisis, alternate paradigms are proposed, usually by scientists who are young or new to the field and thus more open-minded. Slowly, one of the alternate paradigms triumphs over the competing paradigms for several possible reasons: it resolves the crisis better than the others, it offers promise for future research, and it is more aesthetic than its competitors. The reasons for converting to a new paradigm are never completely rational. Because different paradigms justify themselves with their own terms, one must actually step into a paradigm to understand it. Kuhn even used the word 'faith' to describe a conversion. As the scientific community is converted to the new paradigm, normal science begins anew under a new set of basic assumptions. The converted scientists, argued Kuhn, did not merely reinterpret old data in new ways, but rather "work[ed] in a different world" [28] after their conversion. Kuhn departed from traditional evolutionary views with his argument that a new paradigm with its new foundation is "incommensurable" with the old paradigm. Unlike evolutionary science, in which new knowledge fills a gap of ignorance, in Kuhn's model new knowledge replaces incompatible knowledge. Thus science is not a continuous or cumulative endeavor: when a paradigm shift occurs there is a revolution similar to a political revolution, with fundamental and pervasive changes in method and understanding. Each successive vision about the nature of the universe makes the past vision obsolete; predictions, though more precise, remain similar to the predictions of the past paradigm in their general orientation, but the new explanations do not accommodate the old. Kuhn argued against scientific realism. Each new paradigm increases predictive accuracy, but scientists have no reason to believe that the accuracy of explanation is closer to corresponding to what is "really there." He saw that the reason that one paradigm survives and another dies is because one solves puzzles better, not because it is a more accurate representation of reality: (27) A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is "really there. " [29] When he looked at history, Kuhn believed that he could "design a list of criteria that would enable an uncommitted observer to distinguish the earlier from the more recent theory time after time," [30] but this list would include nothing about approaching truth. Judging from the history of science, Kuhn believed that it was "implausible" to say that theory is approaching truth. There is no linear advancement of theory toward truth: Newton's mechanics improves on Aristotle's and ... Einstein's improves on Newton's as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein's general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle's than... to Newton's. [31] According to Kuhn, Einstein's theory is not merely a more complex version of Newton's. Einsteinian theory heads in its own direction; there is "no coherent direction of ontological development." This statement embodies, and indeed follows from, the idea of "Revolution" for which Kuhn argued. In the closing chapter of his book, Kuhn proposed the need for a goal to guide science to replace the idea of progressing toward the truth: The development process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings-a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything.... We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance. [32] Kuhn thus argued against the notion of science as an activity approximating more and more closely the truth in nature. With his suggestion that human beings are forever separate from truth, Kuhn implied that truth does not guide science and thus removed from science the teleological goal of finding truth. (28)Truth cannot be observed and therefore cannot be leading scientists to better puzzle solving. Kuhn explained away truth using the analogy of Darwin's theory of evolution: "the entire process may have occurred, as we now suppose biological evolution did, without the benefit of a set goal, a permanent fixed scientific truth, of which each stage in the development of scientific knowledge is a better exemplar." [33] Science is not pulled forward by truth; science is propelled forward by the puzzles solved during normal science. As McMullin explained Kuhn's theory, as more puzzles are solved, scientists are not led to "a new level of understanding," but to "an illusion of understanding." [34] The "illusion of understanding" that Kuhn implied threatens traditional scientific rationality, for "illusion" is not at all what Newton and the logical empiricists believed to be the product of science. [35] Kuhn issued a challenge to scientific realism and to scientific rationality itself. His theory raised many questions about the rationality of science that have been feeding a lasting controversy. The challenges facing scientific realism-the idea that guided modern science from its beginnings in the scientific revolution until the twentieth century-are such that it will probably never be restored. In a sense, we have circled back to the ancient and medieval practice of separating scientific theory from physical reality; both medieval scientists and Kuhn would agree that no theory corresponds to reality and therefore any number of theories might equally well explain a natural phenomenon. [36] Neither twentieth-century atomic theorists nor medieval astronomers are able to claim that their theories accurately describe physical phenomena. The inability to return to scientific realism suggests a tripartite division of the history of science, with a period of scientific realism fitting between two periods in which there is no insistence that theory correspond to reality. Although both scientific realism and the evolutionary idea of scientific progress appeal to common sense, both existed for only a few hundred years. Endnotes Endnotes: