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Birth
Peter Kuhn was born in Ohio on July 18th, 1922. (Britannica, 2018) -
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Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn is sometimes referred to as the most influential philosopher of science in the 20th century, as he has forever changed the way that philosophers and historians interpret science. Kuhn introduced 4 progressive stages of science, as well as the concepts of normal science, paradigms, and incommensurability, as they pertain to the philosophy of science. He went on to declare 5 criteria one should assess a scientific theory's value with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOGZEZ96ynI -
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Educational Achievement: BS, MS, PhD
At Harvard University, Thomas earned his 1943 BS and 1946 MS in physics, all before ascertaining a Ph.D. in the history of science. (Britannica) Thomas Kuhn's dual education potentiated the acceptance of his works, as he harbored respect from both scientists and non-scientists; this firmly rooted him to the scientific community, serving to warm the welcoming waters before the precipitation of his coming titles. -
"Structure" (General)
In Kuhn's mightily influential "...Structure..."—his most appraised contribution—he introduces four stages of science, paradigms with shifts thereof yielding a scientific revolution, and incommensurability. He imparts a more-realistic perspective, one quite divergent from Popper. (Godfrey-Smith 78-85)
Per interpretation, Kuhn elucidates an example of paradigm-shifts in identified revolutions by the following analogy:
"Physica" : Aristolean dynamics :: "Principia" : Newtonian dynamics (Kuhn 10) -
"Structure" (Expanded)
In his "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Kuhn predicates that there are 4 stages of science: pre-paradigmatic, normal science, crisis, and a scientific revolution.
A paradigm, according to Kuhn, need only seem better than other paradigms, because one paradigm can never answer every question there is to be “confronted”. (18)
Kuhn denotes incommensurability when researchers disagree about the problems their field needs to answer, as their scientific standards are not the same. (148) -
The Essential Tension
In Kuhn's "The Essential Tension", he imparted 5 characteristics which make a scientific theory "good": accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness; in practice, however, these criteria exemplify Kuhnian philosophy's seemingly-intrinsic contradictive nature. "Individually the criteria are imprecise...In addition, when deployed together, they repeatedly prove to conflict with one another" (Kuhn 322) -
Death
On June 17th, 1996, Peter Kuhn died in Massachusetts, at the age of 73. (Britannica, 2018)
