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Thomas Samuel Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio July 18, 1922. He was a Harvard graduate with both a master’s and PhD in Physics. He is considered a physicist and philosopher of science, mostly known for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which highlights his ideas on Incommensurability, Scientific Revolutions, and the Paradigm Shift. (Bird) He died due to throat and lung cancer June 17, 1996. (Stewart) -
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Harvard University
Kuhn spent 9 years in Harvard where he majored in Physics, gaining his master’s in 1946, and his PhD in 1949. While he majored in Physics, this is also where he started to study the history of science, which gained him recognition as a Philosopher of Science (Bird). -
Harvard's Society of Fellows
Kuhn was appointed a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (Swerdlow). This is when he started to do more in-depth research on the history and philosophy of science. Kuhn spent most of his dedication on studying Aristotle’s theories of motion. He found that Aristotle’s point of views were difficult to understand because he was viewing them from a more modern scientific outlook and needed to understand it from Aristotle’s era of scientific method’s (Stewart). -
The Structure for Scientific Revolutions + Video
One of Kuhn's most famous book introduces his idea’s paradigm’s and the paradigm shift’s that occur in science. The idea that a paradigm is the current law and theories of science that are accepted to be true by all. When these laws and theories start to be insufficient in solving scientific problems, it enters a state of crisis, which prompts scientists to create and discover new laws and theories to solve problems, leading to a Paradigm Shift (Bird). -
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Scientific Development and Lexical Change (Hopkins, 1984) and The Presence of Past Science (University College, 1987)
Kuhn spoke of incommensurability in his published 1962 book but did not go into much detail. The concept is there is no proper scientific method for problem-solving. With no basis of what a scientific method is, it poses the issue that no two paradigms are comparable to one another, which paradigm is better, or an improvement of a previous(Bird). Kuhn attempts to elaborate through a series of lectures between John Hopkins, and University College, London(Swerdlow).
