Person
Thomas S. Kuhn
American historian and philosopher of science (1922–1996); turned “paradigm” into a central idea for how science works.
Biography
Thomas S. Kuhn was born in Cincinnati in 1922 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 17 June 1996. He moved from Princeton to MIT in 1979; from 1982 to 1991 he held the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professorship in Philosophy and retired in 1991.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, University of Chicago Press) he described science not as steady accumulation but as a process in phases: “normal science” in which a paradigm supplies puzzles, then piling anomalies, crisis and revolution. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, paradigm is used in two senses: exemplary achievements and a broader “disciplinary matrix”. A second edition with a postscript appeared in 1970.
The social sciences took up his ideas with great enthusiasm; he himself doubted that the social sciences could sustain a long period of normal science. The book has been printed more than a million times and translated into more than a dozen languages.
In this course
Against the loose use of the word “paradigm”, this lesson (What Is a Theory? Paradigms and Classifications) shows Kuhn’s own meaning.
Key works
- Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — The source of the concept of paradigm and the normal science–revolution scheme.