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Chapter2 1

Thomas Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' critiques traditional views of scientific progress, arguing that science is defined by the activities of scientists rather than a linear advancement. He introduces the concept of 'normal science,' where scientists operate within shared paradigms, and challenges the notion of 'Whig history,' which interprets the past as a straightforward progression towards current beliefs. Kuhn's work emphasizes the importance of understanding scientific revolutions as irregular changes rather than mere steps in a teleological narrative.

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7 views1 page

Chapter2 1

Thomas Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' critiques traditional views of scientific progress, arguing that science is defined by the activities of scientists rather than a linear advancement. He introduces the concept of 'normal science,' where scientists operate within shared paradigms, and challenges the notion of 'Whig history,' which interprets the past as a straightforward progression towards current beliefs. Kuhn's work emphasizes the importance of understanding scientific revolutions as irregular changes rather than mere steps in a teleological narrative.

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Nikhil Kumar
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2

The Kuhnian Revolution

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970, first published


in 1962) challenged the dominant popular and philosophical pictures of the
history of science. Rejecting the formalist view with its normative stance,
Kuhn focused on the activities of and around scientific research: in his work
science is merely what scientists do. Rejecting steady progress, he argued
that there have been periods of normal science punctuated by revolutions.
Kuhn’s innovations were in part an ingenious reworking of portions of the
standard pictures of science, informed by rationalist emphases on the power
of ideas, by positivist views on the nature and meaning of theories, and by
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas about forms of life and about perception. The
result was novel, and had an enormous impact.
One of the targets of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is what is known
(since Butterfield 1931) as “Whig history,” history that attempts to construct
the past as a series of steps toward (and occasionally away from) present views.
Especially in the history of science there is a temptation to see the past through
the lens of the present, to see moves in the direction of what we now believe
to be the truth as more rational, more natural, and less needing of causal
explanation than opposition to what we now believe. But since events must
follow their causes, a sequence of events in the history of science cannot be
explained teleologically, simply by the fact that they represent progress. Whig
history is one of the common buttresses of too-simple progressivism in the
history of science, and its removal makes room for explanations that include
more irregular changes.
According to Kuhn, normal science is the science done when members of
a field share a recognition of key past achievements in their field, beliefs about
which theories are right, an understanding of the important problems of
the field, and methods for solving those problems. In Kuhn’s terminology,
scientists doing normal science share a paradigm. The term, originally
referring to a grammatical model or pattern, draws particular attention to

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