Thomas Kuhn

  • History for Philosophical Purposes

    History for Philosophical Purposes
    Thomas Kuhn began his historical studies of science, which was just a young academic discipline at the time. It was clear that scientific change was not always as straight forward as the standard, traditional view would have it. Kuhn was the first and most important author to create a developed articulated account. He called his work 'History for Philosophical Purposes".
  • Kuhn Scientific Revolutions

    Kuhn Scientific Revolutions
    Between 1962 and 1970, Kuhn described the development of science is not uniform but alternating normal amd revolutionary. Normal science, to him, is like puzzle solving. The solver in a normal science problem expects to have a reasonable chance of solving. Revolutionary science, involve a revision to a scientific belief or practice.
  • Kuhn's Paradigm

    Kuhn's Paradigm
    Kuhn described a paradigm with relating it to a puzzle-solution. He said a paradigm as exemplar fulfills three functions: it suggest a new puzzle; it suggest approaches to solving those puzzles; it is a standard by which the quality of a proposed puzzle solution can be measured.
  • Kuhn's Early Semantic Incommensurability Thesis

    Kuhn wanted to explain his own experience or reading Aristotle, which first led him with the impression that Aristotle was an inexplicably poor scientist. But careful study led to change in his understanding that allowed him to see Aristotle was indeed an excellent scientist. Kuhn took the incommensurability that prevented him from properly understanding Aristotle to be at least partly a linguistic, semantic matter.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euE7PP_RUfk
  • Citation

    Bird, Alexander, "Thomas Kuhn", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
    Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Print.