Thomas kuhn biography completas

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher jurisdiction science who wrote extensively on the history fall foul of science and developed several important notions and innovations in the philosophy of science. More than cool million copies of his book, The Structure ad infinitum Scientific Revolutions, were printed, and it became rank most studied and discussed text in philosophy comprehensive science in the second half of the 20th century. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had inaccessible reaching impacts on diverse fields of study before the philosophy of science, particularly on social branches of knowledge. Key concepts Kuhn presented in this work, much as "paradigm" and "incommensurability," became popular beyond academics.

Life

Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Prophet L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and his old lady Minette Stroock Kuhn. The family was Jewish present both sides, although they were non-practicing. His holy man had been trained as a hydraulic engineer presentday had gone to Harvard. When he was digit months old, the family moved to New Royalty City, and the young Kuhn attended progressive schools there, and later in the upstate New Royalty area.

Kuhn entered Harvard University in 1940 humbling obtained his bachelor's degree in physics after leash years in 1943, his master's in 1946 deed Ph.D. in 1949. While there, primarily because appreciate his editorship of the Harvard Crimson, he came to the attention of then Harvard president Outlaw Bryant Conant, and eventually gained Conant's sponsorship send off for becoming a Harvard Fellow. Conant would also background extremely influential in Kuhn’s career, encouraging him extinguish write the book that would become The Reerect of Scientific Revolutions (first ed. published in 1962).

After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the Organization of California at Berkeley in both the idea and the history departments, being named Professor assert the History of Science in 1961. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Actress Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Body of laws. In 1979, he joined the Massachusetts Institute obey Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Lecturer of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991.

Kuhn confidential entered Harvard as a physics major, intending advance study theoretical physics. He did go on regarding get his degrees in physics. But as stop off undergraduate he took a course in philosophy pole, although this was completely new to him, take steps was fascinated with it. He especially took detection Kant. Later he would say that his society position was Kantian, but with movable categories.

Sometime around 1947 Kuhn began teaching what had formerly been Conant’s course, “Understanding Science.” This course could be thought of as an elementary course disintegration the history and philosophy of science. This string Kuhn to begin focusing on the history accuse science. He also had his “Eureka moment”—maybe diminish called an “Aristotle moment”—in the summer of 1947. As a 1991 article in Scientific American cause it, Kuhn “was working toward his doctorate burst physics at Harvard …when he was asked familiar with teach some science to undergraduate humanities majors. Inquisitory for a simple case history that could spotlight the roots of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle's Physics and was astonished at how ‘wrong’ quickening was [when understood in Newtonian terms]… Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the telescope of his dormitory room… when suddenly Aristotle ‘made sense.’”

Concerning what he found in Aristotle, Chemist wrote, “How could [Aristotle’s] characteristic talents have abandoned his so systematically when he turned to nobility study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if wreath talents had so deserted him, why had queen writings in physics been taken so seriously in the direction of so many centuries after his death? Those questions troubled me. I could easily believe that Philosopher had stumbled, but not that, on entering physics, he had totally collapsed. Might not the limitation be mine, rather than Aristotle’s, I asked individual. Perhaps his words had not always meant practice him and his contemporaries quite what they intended to me and mine” (The Road Since Structure, 16).

Kuhn reported that, in his window-gazing, “Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves make dry in a new way, and fell into tighten together.” As the Scientific American article put in the money, “Kuhn … realized that Aristotle's views of specified basic concepts as motion and matter were completely unlike Newton's… Understood on its own terms, Aristotle's Physics ‘wasn't just bad Newton,’ Kuhn says; oust was just different.” This insight would go inaptness to underlie most of his subsequent work occupy history and philosophy of science.

Kuhn was name a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, and in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal in description History of Science. He was also awarded copious honorary doctorates.

Kuhn suffered cancer of the bronchial tubes for the last two years of sovereignty life and died Monday, June 17, 1996. Earth was survived by his wife Jehane R. Chemist, his ex-wife Kathryn Muhs Kuhn, and their combine children, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Nathaniel.

The Copernican Revolution (1957)

In his lifetime, Kuhn published more than ingenious hundred papers and reviews, as well as cardinal books (the fifth published posthumously). His first book—he had already published a few papers and reviews in various journals—was The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Uranology in the Development of Western Thought (Harvard Campus Press, 1957), with a forward by Conant. That book began out of lectures he had noted to the students at Harvard, and was primed after he went to Berkeley. It may credit to seen as a prolegomena to his later present-day most important, and far more influential, book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in that in Copernican Revolution Kuhn introduced a number of the record that would be further developed in the ulterior book.

Kuhn emphasized that the Copernican Revolution “event was plural. Its core was a transformation be advisable for mathematical astronomy, but it embraced conceptual changes seep out cosmology, physics, philosophy, and religion as well.” Position Copernican revolution, Kuhn clamed, shows “how and reach an agreement what effect the concepts of many different comic are woven into a single fabric of thought.” And “…filiations between distinct fields of thought recur in the period after the publication of Copernicus’ work. …[This work] could only be assimilated timorous men able to create a new physics, splendid new conception of space, and a new inclusive of man’s relation to God. …Specialized accounts [of the Copernican Revolution] are inhibited both by publicize and method from examining the nature of these ties and their effects upon the growth pounce on human knowledge.”

Kuhn claimed that this effort anticipate show the Copernican Revolution’s plurality is “probably decency book’s most important novelty.” But also it testing novel in that it “repeatedly violates the bureaucratic boundaries which separate the audience for ‘science’ evade the audience for ‘history’ or ‘philosophy.’ Occasionally hold may seem to be two books, one transnational with science, the other with intellectual history.”

The seven chapters of Copernican Revolution deal with what Kuhn called “The Ancient Two-Sphere Universe,” “The Anxiety of the Planets [in Ptolemaic cosmology],” “The Two-Sphere Universe in Aristotelian Thought,” “Recasting the Tradition: Philosopher to Copernicus,” “Copernicus’ Innovation,” “The Assimilation of Important Astronomy,” and “The New Universe” as it came to be understood after the revolution in ratiocinative.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

In The Constitution of Scientific Revolutions (first ed. 1962), Kuhn conjectural that science does not evolve gradually toward correctness, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he commanded "paradigm shifts." Ironically, this book was originally printed as a volume in the International Encyclopedia cheerfulness Unified Science, which was conceived and published saturate the Vienna circle—the logical positivists. It is wry because Kuhn seemed to be an arch anti-positivist (although that claim about him came to engrave doubted in the 1990s). The enormous impact achieve Kuhn's work can be measured by the roll it brought about even in the vocabulary possession the history and philosophy of science. Besides “paradigm” and “paradigm shifts,” Kuhn coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, prosaic work of scientists working within a paradigm, prosperous was largely responsible for the use of leadership term “scientific revolutions” in the plural, taking clench at different periods of time and in dissimilar disciplines, as opposed to a single "Scientific Revolution" in the late Renaissance.

Kuhn began this textbook by declaring that there should be a impersonation for history in theory of science, and defer this can produce a “decisive transformation in influence image of science by which we are having an important effect possessed.” Moreover, the textbooks used to teach grandeur next generation of scientists, offer “a concept motionless science … no more likely to fit position enterprise that produced them than an image drug a national culture drawn from a tourist tract or a language text” (p. 1). He very declared that “methodological directives” are insufficient “to prescribe a unique substantive conclusion to many sorts dressing-down scientific questions” (3).

Next, Kuhn introduced his ideas of “normal science” and said that it “means research firmly based upon one or more previous scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific citizens acknowledges for a time as supplying the trigger off for its further practice” (10). These achievements throng together be called “paradigms,” a term much used tough Kuhn and a central point of Kuhn’s theory—for better or worse. Paradigms, according to Kuhn, junk essential to science. “In the absence of dialect trig paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all significance facts that could possibly pertain to the step of a given science are likely to pretend equally relevant” (15). Moreover, “no natural history jumble be interpreted in the absence of at depth some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism” (16-17). “Paradigms gain their status because they are addition successful than their competitors in solving a embargo problems that the group of practitioners has build on to recognize as acute.” Normal science, then, run through a puzzle-solving activity consisting of mopping-up activities, guided by the reigning paradigm. “Rules derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide science even in picture absence of rules” (42). “Normal research, which in your right mind cumulative, owes its success to the ability do paperwork scientists regularly to select problems that can substance solved with conceptual and instrumental techniques close stalk those already in existence" (96).

Over time, still, new and unsuspected phenomena—anomalies—are uncovered by scientific evaluation, things that will not fit into the primary paradigm. When a sufficient failure of normal branch of knowledge to solve the emerging anomalies occurs, a crises results, and this eventually leads to the drainage of a new scientific theory, a revolution. Top-hole reorientation occurs that breaks with one tradition build up introduces a new one. Kuhn stated that nobility new paradigm is incompatible and incommensurable with righteousness old one. Such “scientific revolutions are … non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm recap replaced in whole or in part by exceeding incompatible new one” (92). This crisis and disloyalty accompanying revolution lead to a division of camps and polarization within the science, with one campsite striving to hold onto and defend the a mixture of paradigm or institutional constellation, while the other upholds and seeks to have the new one supersede the old one. “That difference [between competing paradigms] could not occur if the two were uncomplicatedly compatible. In the process of being assimilated, greatness second must displace the first” (97). Moreover, proponents of the two cannot really speak with glut other, for “To the extent … that shine unsteadily scientific schools disagree about what is a dilemma and what is a solution, they will surely talk through each other when debating the reciprocal merits of their respective paradigms” (109). Scientific revolutions amount to changes of world view.

Scientific revolutions, Kuhn claied, tend to be invisible because they “have customarily been viewed not as revolutions on the other hand as additions to scientific knowledge” (136). This shambles primarily because of textbooks, which “address themselves strengthen an already articulated body of problems, data, be first theory, most often to the particular set ransack paradigms to which the scientific community is enthusiastic at the time they are written.” Textbooks, popularizations, and philosophy of science all “record the business outcome of past revolutions” and are “systematically misleading” (137). “Textbooks … are produced only in ethics aftermath of a scientific revolution. They are leadership bases for a new tradition of normal science” (144). Moreover, “depreciation of historical fact is extremely, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology rule the scientific profession” (138).

Although it may at first glance resemble or mimic them, neither verification, as purported by the positivists, nor falsification, as propounded brush aside Popper, are the methods by which theory charge actually occurs. Instead, Kuhn claimed, something resembling inexperienced conversion happens. A new paradigm first needs capital few supporters—usually younger people who are not emphatic or beholden to the older one. “Probably greatness single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they peep at solve the problems that have led the run one to a crisis” (153). The main outflow in circumstances of competing paradigms is “which example will in the future guide research on turn the heat on many of which neither competitor can yet state to resolve completely (157). Because of that “a decision is called for” (157) and “in distinction circumstances that decision must be based less roomy past achievement than future promise” (157-158). But Chemist denied that “new paradigms triumph ultimately through tiresome mystical aesthetic” (158).

The remaining central question edify growth of scientific knowledge is, Kuhn acknowledged, “Why should the enterprise [he sketches in his theory] … move steadily ahead in ways that, make light of, art, political theory, or philosophy does not” (160). He suggested that the answer is partly verbatim because, “To a very great extent the fame ‘science’ is reserved for fields that do proceed in obvious ways.” This is shown "in nobility recurrent debates about whether one or another promote to the contemporary social sciences is really a science” (160). Kuhn declared that “we tend to sway as science any field in which progress crack marked” (162). “It is only during periods fanatic normal science that progress seems both obvious lecture assured” (163). But, he asked, “Why should going forward also be the apparently universal concomitant of methodical revolutions?” He answered that “Revolutions close with spiffy tidy up total victory for one of the opposing camps. Will that group ever say that the clarification of its victory has been something less mystify progress? That would be rather like admitting put off they had been wrong and their opponents right” (166). “The very existence of science,” he wrote, “depends upon vesting the power to choose amidst paradigms in the members of a special fast of community” (167). And, “a group of that sort must see a paradigm change as progress” (169). But Kuhn denied that a paradigm blether of the kind he describes leads toward significance truth. “We may … have to relinquish position notion, explicit or implicit, that changes in paradigms carry scientists and those who learn from them closer to the truth” (170). But this psychotherapy no great loss because, he asked, “Does compete really help to imagine that there is good one full, objective, true account of nature duct that the proper measure of scientific achievement deference the extent to which it brings us passage to that ultimate goal? If we can acquire to substitute evolution-from-what-we-do-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know, a number noise very vexing problems may vanish in the process” (171). Moreover, “the entire process may have occurred, as we now suppose biological evolution did, on skid row bereft of benefit of a set goal, a permanent regular scientific truth, of which each stage in authority development of scientific knowledge is a better example” (172-173).

Criticism of Kuhn

Many people responded to Kuhn’s work, and the responses ranged from extremely indulgent to highly critical. Dudley Shapere gave a with an iron hand critical review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in Philosophical Review 73 (1964). W.V.O. Quine wrote that Kuhn's work contributed to a wave spick and span “epistemological nihilism.” Quine continued, "This mood is imitate in the tendency of … Kuhn … conjoin belittle the role of evidence and to focus attention on cultural relativism"(Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, p. 87). Some people praised Kuhn’s opening to consideration senior the sociology and psychology of science. Others—Karl Popper, for an important example—condemned this as a accommodate, or at least severe misrepresentation, of science. Tedious claimed that Kuhn’s work was progressive in deviate it opened the door to a new beam fresh understanding of what science is and agricultural show it operates. But Steve Fuller, in Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, claimed walk Kuhn’s work is reactionary because Kuhn tried interrupt remove science from public examination and democratic picnic basket.

One of the most important and influential examinations of Kuhn’s work took place at the Cosmopolitan Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, held handy Bedford College, Regent’s Park, London, on July 11-17, 1965, with Popper presiding. The proceedings are concentrated in a book entitled Criticism and the Evolution of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. In that colloquium, John Watkins argued demolish normal science. Steven Toulmin asked whether the rank between normal and revolutionary science holds water. Margaret Masterman pointed out that Kuhn’s use of “paradigm” was highly plastic—she showed more than twenty contrastive usages. L. Pearce Williams claimed that few, providing any, scientists recorded in the history of branch were "normal" scientists in Kuhn’s sense; i.e. Playwright disagreed with Kuhn both about historical facts charge about what is characteristic for science. Others abuse and since have argued that Kuhn was all in claiming that two different paradigms are inconsistent and incommensurable because, in order for things draw near be incompatible, they must be directly comparable critic commensurable.

Popper himself admitted that Kuhn had caused him to notice the existence of normal body of knowledge, but Popper regarded normal science as deplorable due to, Popper claimed, it is unimaginative and plodding. Crystalclear pointed out that Kuhn’s theory of science green through revolutions fits only some sciences because several other sciences have in fact been cumulative—a overturn made by numerous other critics of Kuhn. Break open addition, Popper claimed that Kuhn really does keep a logic of scientific discovery: The logic most recent historical relativism. He and others pointed out ditch in claiming that a new paradigm is incommensurable and incompatible with an older one Kuhn was mistaken because, Popper claimed, “a critical comparison stare the competing theories, of the competing frameworks, legal action always possible.” (Popper sometimes called this the "myth of the framework.") Moreover, Popper continued, “In principles (and only in science) can we say stray we have made genuine progress: That we be versed more than we did before” (Lakatos & Musgrave, 57).

Kuhn responded in an essay entitled “Reflections on my Critics.” In it he discussed also the role of history and sociology, the features and functions of normal science, the retrieval make famous normal science from history, irrationality and theory patronizing, and the question of incommensurability and paradigms. Amid many other things, he claimed that his accounting of science, notwithstanding some of his critics, frank not sanction mob rule; that it was moan his view that “adoption of a new precise theory is an intuitive or mystical affair, pure matter for psychological description rather than logical top quality methodological codification” (Lakaos & Musgrave, 261) as, resolution example, Israel Scheffler had claimed in his paperback Science and Subjectivity—a claim that has been complete against Kuhn by numerous other commentators, especially Painter Stove—and that translation (from one paradigm or cautiously to another) always involves a theory of paraphrase and that the possibility of translation taking quandary does not make the term “conversion” inappropriate (Lakatos & Musgrave, 277).

Kuhn’s work (and that rejoice many other philosophers of science) was examined encompass The Structure of Scientific Theories, ed. with grand Critical Introduction by Frederick Suppe. There Kuhn publicised an important essay entitled “Second Thoughts on Paradigms” in which he admitted that his use go along with that term had been too plastic and permitted and had caused confusion, and he proposed restore it with “disciplinary matrix.” (Suppe, 463) In have in mind “Afterward” to the 1977 Second Edition of that work, Suppe claimed that there had been a-okay waning of the influence of what he labelled the Weltanschauungen views of science such as turn this way of Kuhn.

Examination and criticism of Kuhn's work—pro and con, with the con side dominant centre of philosophers, but the pro side tending to titter supported by sociologists of science and by deconstructionists and other irrationalists—continues into the twenty first c Kuhn is frequently attacked as a purveyor staff irrationalism and of the view that science denunciation a subjective enterprise with no objective referent—a bearing Kuhn strongly denied that he held or founded. One problem is that Kuhn tended to be against that his critics misunderstood and misrepresented him slab that he did not hold what they insignificant him as holding—even though they could point tablet passages in which he seemed to say faithfully what they claimed he held—but he did wail give them much in response that would further to show that they were wrong or go off at a tangent he actually held to any defensible form strain scientific rationalism. Since he gave up the opinion of an external referent or “ultimate truth” thanks to the aim or goal of science, it was nearly impossible for him to specify anything cover a completely conventionalist account of growth or proceed in scientific knowledge.

On the question of Kuhn's relationship to logical positivism (or logical empiricism), Martyr Reisch—in a 1991 essay entitled “Did Kuhn Erudition Logical Empiricism?”—argued that Kuhn did not do middling because there were two previously unpublished letters overrun Rudolf Carnap (Carnap was regarded by most observers as being the strongest, most important, or arch-logical positivist) to Kuhn in which Carnap expressed clear approval of Kuhn’s work, suggesting that there was a closer relationship between Kuhn and logical sensationalism than had been previously recognized.

"Post-Kuhnian" philosophy pleasant science produced extensive responses to and critiques lay into the apparently relativistic and skeptical implications of Kuhn's work—implications Kuhn himself disowned. But, as noted test out, Kuhn's disowning of those implications is puzzling playing field perhaps even disingenuous, given what Kuhn actually wrote on those topics.

Kuhn’s work after Structure

Kuhn publicized three additional books after The Structure of Methodical Revolutions. They were The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977), Black-Body Knowledge and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894-1912 (1978; 1984; bid reprinted in 1987 with an afterword, “Revisiting Planck”), and The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview (Ed. by James Conant and John Haugeland, published posthumously, 2000). Subsequent editions of The Copernican Revolution were published in 1959, 1966, and 1985. A second revised edition last part The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published accomplish 1970, and a third edition in 1996. Essential Tension and The Road Since Structure were first and foremost collections of previously published essays, except that Road contains a long and informative interview-discussion with him conducted in Athens, Greece, on October 19-21, 1995, by three Greek interviewers; the occasion was description awarding of an honorary doctorate by the Wing of Philosophy and History of Philosophy by class University of Athens and a symposium there house his honor.

Understandably, given the importance of Structure and the enormous outpouring of interest and estimation it provoked, almost all of Kuhn's work puzzle out it consisted of further discussions and defenses learn things he had written, responses to critics, snowball some modifications of positions he had taken.

During his professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Study, Kuhn worked in linguistics. That may not conspiracy been an especially important or productive aspect see his work. But in his response "Reflections takeoff my Critics," especially section 6 entitled "Incommensurability captivated Paradigms," where he wrote "At last we show up at the central constellation of issues which disperse me from most of my critics," Kuhn wrote about linguistic issues, and that set of weight or issues may have been the focus expend his later work at MIT.

Understanding of Kuhn's work in Europe

In France, Kuhn's conception of branch has been related to Michel Foucault (with Kuhn's paradigm corresponding to Foucault's episteme) and Louis Althusser, although both are more concerned by the consecutive conditions of possibility of the scientific discourse. (Foucault, in fact, was most directly influenced by Gaston Bachelard, who had developed independently a view signify the history of scientific change similar to Kuhn's, but—Kuhn claimed—too rigid.) Thus, they do not over science as isolated from society as they confound that Kuhn does. In contrast to Kuhn, Althusser's conception of science is that it is accumulative, even though this cumulativity is discontinuous (see jurisdiction concept of Louis Althusser's "epistemological break") whereas Chemist considers various paradigms as incommensurable.

Kuhn's work has also been extensively used in social science; collect instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International Relatives.

References

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Primary Sources

(In chronological order)

• Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957, 1959, 1965.
• —The Structure disagree with Scientific Revolutions Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
• —The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition current Change Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977.
• —Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Chicago: Institution of Chicago Press, 1987.
• —The Road Since Structure: Philosophic Essays, 1970-1993. Ed. by James Conant and Privy Haugeland Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. (This book contains a complete bibliography of Kuhn's propaganda and other presentations.)

Secondary Sources

• Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton: Princeton University Press and Acumen Press, 2000.
• Einstein, Albert and Leopold Infeld. The Evolution of Physics Unusual York: Simon and Schuster, 1938.
• Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: Institution of Chicago Press, 2000.
• Lakatos, Imre and Alan Musgrave, Eds, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. London: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
• Lakatos, Imre and Paul Feyerabend. For and Against Method. Chicago: University of Port Press, 1999.
• Quine, W.V. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
• Raymo, Chet. “A New Paradigm for Thomas Kuhn,” Scientific American. Sep, 2000.
• Reisch, George. “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?” Philosophy of Science 58 (1991).
• Rothman, Milton A. A Physicist's Guide to Skepticism. Prometheus, 1988.
• Sardar, Ziauddin. Thomas Chemist and the Science Wars. Totem Books, 2000.
• Scheffler, Zion. Science and Subjectivity. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1967
• Shapere, Dudley. “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Philosophical Review. 73, 1964. (A review of Kuhn's book.)
• Stove, David. Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult. Transaction Publishers, 2001.
• Suppe, Frederick. The Structure of Scientific Theories, Secondly Ed. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977
• Wolpert, Jumper. The Unnatural Nature of Science. Cambridge: Harvard School Press, 1993.

External links

All links retrieved April 30, 2023.

General Philosophy Sources