Thomas Samuel Kuhn (/ˈkuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) 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.
Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He 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 BS degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943, where he also obtained MS and PhD degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949, respectively, under the supervision of John Van Vleck. 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. 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. Kuhn interviewed and tape recorded Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before Bohr's death. 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.
His family was Jewish on both sides.
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, 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), 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". 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".
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.
Kuhn, T.S. The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science. Isis, 52 (1961): 161–193.
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, July 9–15, 1961). New York and London: Basic Books and Heineman, 1963.
↑ The title of his doctoral thesis was The Cohesive Energy of Monovalent Metals as a Function of Their Atomic Quantum Defects.
↑ Thomas S. Kuhn; et al. (November 17, 1962). "Last interview with Niels Bohr by Thomas S. Kuhn, Leon Rosenfeld, Aage Petersen, and Erik Rudinger at Professor Bohr's Office, Carlsberg, Copenhagen, Denmark Saturday morning, November 17, 1962". Oral History Transcript – Niels Bohr. Center for History of Physics. Retrieved October 5, 2015.
↑ Horgan, John (May 1991). "Profile: Reluctant Revolutionary". Scientific American: 40.
↑ Kuhn, Thomas (2000). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The University of Chicago Press. pp. 24–25. ISBN 978-1-4432-5544-8.
↑ Dyson, Freeman (May 6, 1999). The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolutions. Oxford University Press, Inc. p. 144. ISBN 978-0-19-512942-7.
↑ Harris, Matthew (2010). The notion of papal monarchy in the thirteenth century : the idea of paradigm in church history. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press. p. 120. ISBN 978-0-7734-1441-9.
↑ E.g. Alan Ryan, "Paradigms Lost: How Oxford Escaped the Paradigm Wars of the 1960s and 1970s', in Christopher Hood, Desmond King, & Gillian Peele, eds, Forging a Discipline, Oxford University Press, 2014.
1 2 3 Kuhn, Thomas (1977). The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (PDF). University of Chicago Press. pp. 320–39.
↑ See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962 (1st ed.), p.44.
↑ Moleski, Martin X. Polanyi vs. Kuhn: Worldviews Apart. The Polanyi Society. Missouri Western State University. Retrieved March 20, 2008.
↑ "Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award". American Chemical Society. Retrieved September 19, 2012.
Harris, Matthew Edward. The Notion of Papal Monarchy in the Thirteenth Century: The Idea of Paradigm in Church History. Lampeter and Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7734-1441-9.
Hoyningen-Huene, Paul (1993). Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Thomas Kuhn.
Bird, Alexander. "Thomas Kuhn". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science BOOK VI: Kuhn on Revolution and Feyerabend on Anarchy – with free downloads for public use.