The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

A short book, first published as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, that changed how historians and philosophers describe scientific change. Kuhn argues that a mature science spends most of its time in normal science, solving puzzles within a paradigm: a shared set of exemplary achievements, theories, methods and standards that a community takes for granted. Anomalies that resist solution accumulate until they produce a crisis. A scientific revolution then replaces the old paradigm with a new one, as in the shifts from Ptolemy to Copernicus, from phlogiston to oxygen, and from Newton to Einstein. Kuhn compares the change to a gestalt switch and claims that rival paradigms can be incommensurable, lacking a neutral standard by which to compare them. Science still progresses, but not necessarily towards a final truth. The Postscript added in 1970 clarifies the term paradigm, which critics said he used loosely, and answers the charge that his account makes theory choice irrational.

It gave the world the term paradigm shift and remains the starting point for any serious discussion of how science changes and how far it is objective.