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Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn, both Jewish.
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He received his Ph.D in the history of science at Harvard University.
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He started teaching the philosophy of science at Harvard University.
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Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954.
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He started teaching the philosophy of science at University of California at Berkeley.
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He studied the development of the heliocentric theory of the solar system during the Renaissance.
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He argued that scientific research and thought are defined by “paradigms,” or conceptual world-views, that consist of formal theories, classic experiments, and trusted methods. Scientists typically accept a prevailing paradigm and try to extend its scope by refining theories, explaining puzzling data, and establishing more precise measures of standards and phenomena. (Cont.)
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(Cont.) Eventually, however, their efforts may generate insoluble theoretical problems or experimental anomalies that expose a paradigm’s inadequacies or contradict it altogether. This accumulation of difficulties triggers a crisis that can only be resolved by an intellectual revolution that replaces an old paradigm with a new one.
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He started teaching the philosophy of science at Princeton University.
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He started teaching the philosophy of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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In 1982, he was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society.
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In 1994 Kuhn was diagnosed with lung cancer.
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He died on June 17, 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the age of 73.