Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996)

By JXSantos

  • Thomas Kuhn is Born in Cincinnati, Ohio

    He was the first child born out of two; his father was a native Cincinnatian, and his mom a native New Yorker. Kuhn's dad was a hydraulic engineer trained at MIT, and his mom was an educated woman from an affluent family (Marcum, n.d.).

  • Graduates from Harvard

    Graduates from Harvard and spends the remainder of World War Two there. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018)

  • Gains Master's Degree in Physics

  • Gains Doctorate in Physics

    Kuhn gained his doctorate in physics and was invited to the Society of Fellows at Harvard. Kuhn would begin to teach courses in science for undergraduates in the humanities. This course was based around historical case studies and presented Kuhn with an opportunity to study historical text (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018).

  • Kuhn Begins His Historical Studies of Science.

    When Kuhn began his studies, the history of science was a reasonably young subject. While conducting studies, Thomas Kuhn noticed that the traditional view on scientific change was more complex than the conventional view would suggest. In 1956, possessing modern science knowledge, Kuhn would become bewildered by Aristotle's scientific work (Marcum, n.d.).

  • Publishes First Book

    Kuhn publishes his first book "The Copernican Revolution". In this book, Kuhn possibly foreshadowed his theory of paradigms by showing that "Copernicus was a modern scientist who overthrew an unscientific and outmoded viewpoint" of his current time.

  • Kuhn Publishes His Book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".

    Kuhn explains the development of science as no other scientist has done before. In this model, science is contained within a theory and carries on as a paradigm. A problem occurs when new observations starts to not fit within that paradigm. A crisis then occurs when to many of these observations don't fit. A new theory will then be proposed and if the theory explains the new data better then the old model, that theory will take over as the paradigm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cp6pEzx3uw