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Birth of Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn, physicist and philosopher, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and was extremely influential in the field of philosophy of science. He developed the term “paradigm shift” which we are all familiar with and made several claims about the linear progress of scientific knowledge. This led him to develop his model of scientific knowledge that's broken down to four stages.
https://youtu.be/Yn8cCDtVd5w?si=ddlFtp61-KCtAN1w -
Shift from Physics to Philosophy
Interestingly enough, Kuhn did not start all of his academic studies directly in the philosophy of science. Thomas Kuhn earned a BS, MS, and PhD degrees in physics from Harvard. It wasn’t until his few years in the Harvard Society of Fellows where he began to switch or “shift” from physics to the philosophy of science. Kuhn states in the preface of his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” that his time in the Society of Fellows allowed him the freedom to pursue the new field of study. -
Published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published his first edition of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. This will go on to be his most notable work due to the contents where he discusses his method of scientific approach. The overall objective in Kuhn’s book is to discuss how there is a tendency of assumptions around normal science and how we need to challenge and be critical about said assumptions. This led him to develop his “paradigm shift” model broken down into 5 phases. -
The Kuhn-Popper Debate
The Kuhn-Popper debate was a series of discussions over published essays on the methodology of research. Kuhn debated that scientific research progresses through paradigms and paradigm shifts. On the contrary, Karl Popper believed that this was too deterministic and that science should never follow a ‘normal’ standard of research. Although there was no winner in the debate, the two pushed for a more crucial outlook on the processes of scientific research.