Kuhn Thomas S(amuel) (1922–96), American historian and philosopher of science. Kuhn studied at Harvard, where he received degrees in physics (1943, 1946) and a doctorate in the history of science (1949). He then taught history of science or philosophy of science at Harvard (1951–56), Berkeley (1956–64), Princeton (1964–79), and M.I.T. (1979–91). Kuhn traced his shift from physics to the history and philosophy of science to a moment in 1947 when he was asked to teach some science to humanities majors. Searching for a case study to illuminate the development of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle’s Physics and was astonished at how ‘simply wrong’ it was. After a while, Kuhn came to ‘think like an Aristotelian physicist’ and to realize that Aristotle’s basic concepts were totally unlike Newton’s, and that, understood on its own terms, Aristotle’s Physics was not bad Newtonian mechanics. This new perspective resulted in The Copernican Revolution (1957), a study of the transformation of the Aristotelian geocentric image of the world to the modern heliocentric one.
Pondering the structure of these changes, Kuhn produced his immensely influential second book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). He argued that scientific thought is defined by ‘paradigms,’ variously describing these as disciplinary matrixes or exemplars, i.e., conceptual world-views consisting of beliefs, values, and techniques shared by members of a given community, or an element in that constellation: concrete achievements used as models for research. According to Kuhn, scientists accept a prevailing paradigm in ‘normal science’ and attempt to articulate it by refining its theories and laws, solving various puzzles, and establishing more accurate measurements of constants. Eventually, however, their efforts may generate anomalies; these emerge only with difficulty, against a background of expectations provided by the paradigm. The accumulation of anomalies triggers a crisis that is sometimes resolved by a revolution that replaces the old paradigm with a new one. One need only look to the displacement of Aristotelian physics and geocentric astronomy by Newtonian mechanics and heliocentrism for instances of such paradigm shifts. In this way, Kuhn challenged the traditional conception of scientific progress as gradual, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. He elaborated upon these themes and extended his historical inquiries in his later works, The Essential Tension (1977) and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity (1978).
See also PARADIGM , PHILOSOPHY OF SCI- ENC. R.Ar.
