Thomas Kuhn

Also known as Thomas Samuel Kuhn, Thomas S. Kuhn

American historian, physicist and philosopher (1922 – 1996)

AI overview

Thomas Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science who fundamentally changed how we understand how scientific knowledge advances. His most influential idea was that science doesn't progress gradually but instead moves through revolutionary shifts he called "paradigm changes," where scientists suddenly adopt entirely new ways of understanding the world—a concept that transformed how philosophers, historians, and scientists think about the nature of scientific progress.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

In the Vinony graph

Thomas Kuhn appears in Vinony's American Academy of Arts & Sciences collection — one of 9,861 entries.

Within Vinony's link graph, Thomas Kuhn is referenced by 737 other articles, and connects out to positivism, Karl Popper and Ernst Mach.

It is catalogued under topics including 1922 births, 1996 deaths and 20th-century American historians.

Its subject is documented across 70 Wikipedia language editions.

Person · Open Library

Works: 31

Top works

On the Philosophy and Religion
Fuhrungsethik in Organisationen
Einführung in Die Volkswirtschaftslehre
Arbeitsbuch Zur Einführung in Die Volkswirtschaftslehre
Ethik der gestaltbaren Zahlen

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Gender: Male
Origin: Germany
Active from: 1965-01-07

dieter thomas kuhngerman

Discography

Official site Discogs Stream

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Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 51
Total plays: 204

via Last.fm · Thomas Kuhn

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

Analysis of Relative Gene Expression Data Using Real-Time Quantitative PCR and the 2−ΔΔCT Method
· 2001 · cited 160,876x
The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews
· 2021 · cited 77,634x
U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation
· 2015 · cited 57,617x
STAR: ultrafast universal RNA-seq aligner
· 2012 · cited 49,748x
UCSF Chimera—A visualization system for exploratory research and analysis
· 2004 · cited 43,781x

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Quotes

“If a demarcation criterion exists (we must not, I think, seek a sharp or decisive one), it may lie just in that part of science which Sir Karl ignores.”
“Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.”
“I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort. The books and teachers from whom it is acquired present concrete examples together with a multitude of theoretical generalizations. Both are essential carriers of knowledge, and it is therefore Pickwickian to seek a methodological criterion that supposes the scientist can specify in advance whether each imaginable instance fits or would falsify his theory.”
“Somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called “paradigms.” These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners.”
“History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.”
“Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.”

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Wikidata facts

Image: Thomas-kuhn-portrait.png

Show 5 more facts

date of birth: 1922-07-18
date of death: 1996-06-17
Commons category: Thomas Kuhn (philosopher)
name in native language: Thomas Samuel Kuhn
P8168: Eurotrance

Sources (8)

via Wikidata · CC0

~22 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (/kuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, popularizing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.

Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, there is no one-to-one correspondence of assumptions and terms. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon "objectivity" alone. Science must account for subjective perspectives as well, since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/worldview of its researchers and participants.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Thomas Kuhn” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.