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Kuhn's Early Life
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He was educated at Lincoln School, a private school in Manhattan. He moved to the town of Croton-on-Hudson where he attended a private school, Hessian Hills School. He graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut and obtained his BSc degree in physics from Harvard College in 1943, where he also obtained MSc and PhD degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949. -
Paradigm Shifts
A paradigm, in Kuhn’s theory, is a whole way of-doing science, in some particular field. It is a package of claims about the world, methods for gathering and analyzing data, and habits of scientific thought and action. In Kuhn’s theory of science, the big changes in how scientists see the world—the “revolutions” that science undergoes every now and then—occur when one paradigm replaces another. The Kuhn Cycle is a simple cycle of process that connects the pieces and shows you how paradigm (TBC) -
Kuhn's Basic Idea
He argued that science does not evolve gradually towards truth.
Science has a paradigm which remains constant before going through a paradigm shift when current theories can’t explain some phenomenon, and someone proposes a new theory.
Scientific revolutions occur when: the new paradigm better explains the observations, and offers a model that is closer to the objective, external reality; and the new paradigm is incommensurate with the old.
Ex. Darwin's theory replacing the Lamarckian evolution. -
Paradigm Shift
(CTD) shifts happen. There are four phases: Phase 1 - Normal Science, Phase 2 - Model Crisis, Phase 3 - The Model Revolution, Phase 4 - Paradigm Change. A great example of a paradigm change is all the work that went into the theory of gravity. -
Major Works
1954- Named a Guggenheim Fellow 1962- Coined the term paradigm 1982- awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. Books Kuhn, Thomas S. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957 Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962 -
Educational Video
Thomas Kuhn — Paradigms, Incommensurability and Kuhn Loss Here lies a short educational video explaining briefly Paradigms, Incommensurability and Kuhn Loss by popular YouTuber whose page goes by the name of "The Living Philosophy"