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Thomas Kuhn was born on 18 July, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He began his career in 1940 at Harvard University. He began his studies in physics, then history of science, and eventually landed in philosophy of science (Brid). He graduated from Harvard in 1943 and continued his work earning a Master’s degree in 1946. He then earned his doctorate, also in physics, in 1949. He continued on to complete his first work, The Copernican Revolution, in 1957 (Bird).
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1957, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. 1962/1970a, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1970, 2nd edition, with postscript). 1977a, The Essential Tension. Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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In 1961 Kuhn became a professor at the University of California at Berkeley teaching History of Science in the philosophy department. Here he was introduced to Paul Feyerabend, with whom he discussed a draft of his work (Bird).The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was then published in 1962. Kuhn’s work discussed the idea that science was advanced through Paradigm Shifts, which was a controversial idea. -
In Kuhn’s mind, a paradigm is pieces of a puzzle for scientists to move through and put together. He went on to use different terms to describe events in science and paradigms. “Kuhn used the phrase “normal science” for scientific work that occurs within the framework provided by a paradigm” (Peter Godfrey-Smith). He decided that normal science was neat and well organized. Kuhn felt that a crisis in science only occurred when faith in the paradigm to solve an anomaly is lost (Bird). -
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Kuhn felt that there was a structure to scientific development. This structure was as follows, “pre-paradigm science → normal science → extraordinary science → new normal science” (Marcum). Thomas Kuhn’s book and ideas on paradigms were controversial and debated highly among scientists for a long time. Kuhn went on to become an emeritus professor at MIT after retiring from teaching in 1991. Kuhn passed on June 17, 1996 after suffering of cancer for 2 years (Marcum).
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1978, Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, Oxford: Clarendon Press (2nd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 2000, The Road Since Structure, edited by James Conant and John Haugeland, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
