Thomas Kuhn was an American philosopher and historian of science, born in Cincinnati in 1922 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1996. Trained originally as a physicist, he argued in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science does not progress by smoothly accumulating facts but alternates between long stretches of normal science working within a shared paradigm and rare, disruptive paradigm shifts when that shared framework breaks down and is replaced, a picture that put the words paradigm and paradigm shift into everyday use well beyond science itself. Carried under scientist alongside Popper on the same reasoning this file's header gives.
Facts
FieldHistory and philosophy of science 1 Connections
Associated With
Kuhn's paradigm framework substantially developed and popularized the idea that scientific observation is shaped by the observer's existing theoretical commitments.
Proposed
Paradigm, Concepts Kuhn coined paradigm shift in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the direct origin of the modern concept of a scientific paradigm.
Source The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)Thomas Kuhn
Works In
Sources
1. Thomas Kuhn (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Alexander Bird, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004SEP, Bird, first pub. 2004Quote, SEP, Bird, first pub. 2004
The central idea of this extraordinarily influential and controversial book is that the development of science is driven, in normal periods of science, by adherence to what Kuhn called a paradigm.
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