of scientific progress. He described a thought experiment involving an observer who has the opportunity to inspect an assortment of theories, each corresponding to a single stage in a succession of theories. What if the observer is presented with these theories without any explicit indication of their chronological order? Kuhn anticipates that it will be possible to reconstruct their chronology on the basis of the theories' scope and content, because the more recent a theory is, the better it will be as an instrument for solving the kinds of puzzle that scientists aim to solve. Kuhn remarked: "That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress." Influence and reception The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been credited with producing the kind of "paradigm shift" Kuhn discussed. Since the book's publication, over one million copies have been sold, including translations into sixteen different languages. In 1987, it was reported to be the twentieth-century book most frequently cited in the period 1976–1983 in the arts and the humanities. Philosophy The first extensive review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was authored by Dudley Shapere, a philosopher who interpreted Kuhn's work as a continuation of the anti-positivist sentiment of other philosophers of science, including Paul Feyerabend and Norwood Russell Hanson. Shapere noted the book's influence on the philosophical landscape of the time, calling it "a sustained attack on the prevailing image of scientific change as a linear process of ever-increasing knowledge". According to the philosopher Michael Ruse, Kuhn discredited the ahistorical and prescriptive approach to the philosophy of science of Ernest Nagel's The Structure of Science (1961). Kuhn's book sparked a historicist "revolt against positivism" (the so-called "historical turn in philosophy of science" which looked to the history of science as a source of data for developing a philosophy of science), although this may not have been Kuhn's intention; in fact, he had already approached the prominent positivist Rudolf Carnap about having his work published in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. The philosopher Robert C. Solomon noted that Kuhn's views have often been suggested to have an affinity to those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Kuhn's view of scientific knowledge, as expounded in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has been compared to the views of the philosopher Michel Foucault. Sociology The first field to claim descent from Kuhn's ideas was