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Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996)
Thomas Samuel Kuhn, is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century. Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines, but also inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought it closer to the history of science. -
The Structure of The Scienctific Revolution
Most of Kuhn’s subsequent work in philosophy was spent in articulating and developing the ideas in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's account of scientific change is a movement from pre-science or pre-paradigmatic observation and data gathering to the adoption of a paradigm and the activity of normal science, to anomalies that generate a crisis in the existing paradigm, to a revolution that ends with a new paradigm ( Kuhn,1962 ). Link: https://youtu.be/yjh0gHCNvSw -
The Concept of a Paradigm
An important part of Kuhn’s thesis in SSR focuses upon one specific component of the disciplinary matrix. This is the consensus on exemplary instances of scientific research. These exemplars of good science are what Kuhn refers to when he uses the term paradigm. An example of a paradigm would be that the earth is round. A paradigm shift, on the other hand is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline ( Kuhn, 1962 ). -
Incommensurability
Comparison between theories will not be as straightforward as the standard empiricist picture would have it, since the standards of evaluation are themselves subject to change. This sort of difficulty in theory comparison is an instance of what Kuhn and Feyerabend called ‘incommensurability’. Theories are incommensurable when they share no common measure ( Kuhn, 1962 )
