Thinker · TH-0406
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn was an American physicist turned historian and philosopher of science. His Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that mature sciences work within paradigms,…
Thomas Kuhn was an American physicist turned historian and philosopher of science. His Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that mature sciences work within paradigms, shared exemplars and commitments that guide normal puzzle-solving research, and that anomalies can build into crises resolved by revolutions in which one paradigm replaces another. His claims about incommensurability were often read as relativism, which he repeatedly rejected: he held that theory choice is guided by shared values such as accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity and fruitfulness.
Key ideas
- Normal science is puzzle-solving within a paradigm that sets problems and standards.
- Accumulated anomalies can produce crises and, eventually, scientific revolutions.
- Competing paradigms can be partly incommensurable, lacking a fully neutral common measure.
- Theory choice is guided by shared values that underdetermine but still constrain the outcome.
Major works
- The Copernican Revolution (1957)
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
- The Essential Tension (1977)
- The Road since Structure (2000, posthumous)
In the conversation
- Discussion Was plate tectonics a Kuhnian revolution? Geology as a test case
- Discussion Davidson said there are no untranslatable conceptual schemes. A working translator is not so sure
- Discussion Does ‘atom’ in my physics class refer to what Dalton meant by it?
- Question Our CEO keeps announcing “paradigm shifts”. Is that what Kuhn meant?
- Debate Objectivity belongs to scientific communities, not to individual scientists
- Debate Lakatos found the right middle path between Popper and Kuhn