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Birth
Thomas Samuel Kuhn born in Cincinnati, Ohio. -
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The Kuhn-Polanyi Debate
While Kuhn was formulating his book, he was accused of plagiarism because his work appeared to take after Michael Polanyi. Although Polanyi came first with his ideas, their ideas were different enough to describe two faces of the same coin. Polanyi's objective was to describe how scientists draw from their objective views to choose problems, unlike Kuhn's point of view described common "puzzles" that affected all scientists in order to progress. -
The Paradigm Shift
This concept of "Paradigm Shift" is essentially put Kuhn on the map, as it were. The original premise was described was how an intelligent man such as Aristotle could have harbored such "absurd ideas about motion". Through a simple logical progression, he reasoned that his thinking was influenced by the framework of motion that was later created by Galileo and then improved by Newton. The clash of ideas that established a new framework of thinking that allowed scientific thinking to progress. -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Kuhn's book provided a framework to describe why scientists and the scientific community behaved the way it did. The book also described "Incommensurability", how paradigms both old and new are unable to describe each other because the rules that applied to each paradigm differed. He also argued that that science was non-linear and argued that the accumulation of scientific knowledge came from a set of ever-changing rules, circumstances and possibilities. -
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Philosophy Changes After "Structure"
Later in life, Kuhn dropped the concept of paradigm, instead focusing on the semantic aspects of scientific theories. His change in outlook also included at the process of scientific specialization. Including revolutions, it allowed branches in different schools of thought. -
Death
Died in Cambridge, MA from lung cancer