The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

In other words, science didn’t just get an accumulation of new facts when it went from Aristotle to Newton. Kuhn argues that the Aristotelian view of a pendulum wouldn’t have been to see it that way. Kinetic energy becoming potential and back again. In Newton’s day, it was known that a pendulum, once it started swinging, would continue to swing at the same rate, and the closer it approached ideal conditions (less friction or air resistance), it would keep swinging forever. Paradigms, in contrast, don’t work this way. The view, prior to Kuhn, had been that science works via accumulation.

Instead it was an oscillation between the normal, commonplace expansion of existing theories and results, and revolutions whereby entire fields were upended and replaced with a new model from the ground up.Īlthough Kuhn rarely pointed directly to some easily recognizable object as being *the* paradigm he sought to describe… if you’re studying physics for instance, the paradigm is embodied by Newtonian mechanics is balls rolling down inclined planes, pendulums swinging at constant periods or celestial objects following elliptical orbits. In Kuhn’s study, science as it was actually practiced, didn’t work like this at all. In many ways, Kuhn broke the understanding of science: Kuhn’s theory has triggered widespread, controversial discussion across many scientific disciplines. Rather, there are two fundamentally different phases of scientific development in the sciences. According to Kuhn, the sciences do not uniformly progress strictly by scientific method. In 1962, Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which depicted the development of the basic natural sciences in an innovative way. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Kuhn received a doctorate in theoretical physics from Harvard University in 1949 and later shifted his interest to the history and philosophy of science, which he taught at Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Kuhn was a leading contributor to the change of focus in the philosophy and sociology of science in the 1960s. If you would like to stream audio on your browser, click here listen on Soundcloud.Īmerican historian and philosopher Thomas S. This month we read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn