Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (/kuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.

Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon "objectivity" alone. Science must account for subjective perspectives as well, since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/worldview of its researchers and participants.

1. K. Brad Wray, Kuhn's Evolutionary Social Epistemology, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 87.
2. ^ Alexander Bird, "Kuhn and the Historiography of Science" in Alisa Bokulich and William J. Devlin (eds.), Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50 Years On, Springer, 2015.
3. ^ Thomas Kuhn (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): "Not all the achievements of the preceding period of normal science are preserved in a revolution, and indeed a later period of science may find itself without an explanation for a phenomenon that in an earlier period was held to be successfully explained. This feature of scientific revolutions has become known as 'Kuhn-loss'". The term was coined by Heinz R. Post in Post, H. R. (1971), "Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2, 213–255.
4. ^ "Transcendental nominalism" is a position ascribed to Kuhn by Ian Hacking (see D. Ginev, Robert S. Cohen (eds.), Issues and Images in the Philosophy of Science: Scientific and Philosophical Essays in Honour of Azarya Polikarov, Springer, 2012, p. 313).
5. ^ Aviezer Tucker (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, Blackwell Publishing, 2011 : "Analytic Realism".
6. ^ Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970 (2nd ed.), p. 48.
7. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c} Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970 (2nd ed.), p. 44.
8. ^ Robert J. Richards, Lorraine Daston (eds.), Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions' at Fifty: Reflections on a Science Classic, University of Chicago Press, 2016, p. 47.
9. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d} Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970 (2nd ed.), p. vi.
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11. ^ Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970 (2nd ed.), p. 146.
12. ^ Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970 (2nd ed.), p. 27.
13. ^ Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970 (2nd ed.), p. 85.