-
BIRTH
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA into an affluent family. His father, Samuel Louis Kuhn, was an industrial engineer and investment consultant. His Mother, Minette Kuhn, was from a wealthy family in NewYork worked as a freelance editor and was a patron of the arts. -
Period: to
KUHN'S EDUCATION
Thomas Kuhn graduated with BS in Physics summa cum laude in 1943, a master's degree in Physics in 1946 and a doctorate in 1949 at Harvard University. His PhD thesis was The Cohesive Energy of Movement Metals as a Function of Atomic Quantum Defects. While working on his doctorate, he was appointed as an instructor at Harvard and promoted to assistant professor a year later. He began giving undergraduate History of Science course looking at the development of mechanics from Aristotle to Newton. -
Period: to
ROAD TO "THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION"
Thomas Kuhn accepted an offer from the University of California at Berkeley in 1958 where he became an associate professor in both the Philosophy and History Departments with tenure. In that same year, he began a one-year fellowship at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study. It was where he wrote a significant part of his most influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1961, He was promoted to full professor of History of Science at Berkeley. -
'THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION'
Kuhn published his most influential work, The Structure of Scientific Revolution in 1962. In his work, Kuhn paints a picture of the development of science unlike any gone before. According to Kuhn, the development of science is not uniform but has alternating 'normal' and 'revolutionary' phases. Kuhn describes normal science as 'puzzle-solving' (1962/1970a, 35-42) Also, according to Kuhn, scientific revolutions involve a revision to existing belief or practice (1962/1970a, 92) -
THE PARADIGM SHIFT AND INCOMMENSURABILITY
Paradigm shift a term widely used in all disciplines, not just science and this concept made Kuhn's name. Kuhn first described paradigm shift in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Kuhn's analysis of the Copernican Revolution provided him with an example of a paradigm shift. Kuhn also discussed the concept of incommensurability in his work. he used the word incommensurable to describe paradigms that represent wholly different world views of the same subject. -
MORE ON PARADIGM SHIFT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tasVTgZc9Gw
Explaining paradigm shift by Thomas Kuhn -
WORKS CITED
"Thomas Kuhn". Famous Scientists, www.famousscientists.org/thomas-kuhn/. Bird,Alexander, "Thomas Kuhn", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL= https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/thomaskuhn/. McLeod, S. A. (2020, May 01). Thomas Kuhn - science as a paradigm. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/Kuhn-Paradigm.html
