In regard to experimentation and collection of data with a view toward solving problems through the commitment to a paradigm, Kuhn states: "The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not 'the given' of experience but rather 'the collected with difficulty.' They are not what the scientist sees-at least not before his research is well advanced and his attention focused. Guided by the paradigm, normal science is extremely productive: "when the paradigm is successful, the profession will have solved problems that its members could scarcely have imagined and would never have undertaken without commitment to the paradigm". This is followed by " normal science", when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by "puzzle-solving". Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages. In this book, heavily influenced by the fundamental work of Ludwik Fleck, Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called " paradigm shifts" (although he did not coin the phrase, he did contribute to its increase in popularity), in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ( SSR) was originally printed as an article in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, published by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. Main article: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. He served as the president of the History of Science Society from 1969 to 1970. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. At Berkeley, he wrote and published (in 1962) his best known and most influential work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn interviewed and tape recorded Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before Bohr's death. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the history of science in 1961. Kuhn taught a course in the history of science at Harvard from 1948 until 1956, at the suggestion of university president James Conant. As he states in the first few pages of the preface to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his three years of total academic freedom as a Harvard Junior Fellow were crucial in allowing him to switch from physics to the history and philosophy of science. He obtained his BSc degree in physics from Harvard College in 1943, where he also obtained MSc and PhD degrees in physics in 19, respectively, under the supervision of John Van Vleck. He graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, in 1940. It was here that, in sixth through ninth grade, he learned to love mathematics. The family then moved 40 mi (64 km) north to the small town of Croton-on-Hudson, New York where, once again, he attended a private progressive school – Hessian Hills School. įrom kindergarten through fifth grade, he was educated at Lincoln School, a private progressive school in Manhattan, which stressed independent thinking rather than learning facts and subjects. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, both Jewish. Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Minette Stroock Kuhn and Samuel L. 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.Įarly life, family and education Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon "objectivity" alone. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. 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. Thomas Samuel Kuhn ( / k uː n/ July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and 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.
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