Thomas Kuhn
Sign in to saveAmerican historian, physicist and philosopher (1922 – 1996)
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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.
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Person · Open Library
- Born
- 1922-07-18
- Died
- 1996-06-17
- Works
- 31
via Open Library + Wikidata
Listeners · Last.fm
- Listeners
- 51
- Total plays
- 204
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Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
Article
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.
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1922 births1996 deaths20th-century American historians20th-century American Jews20th-century American male writers20th-century American philosophers20th-century American science writersAmerican historians of scienceAmerican male non-fiction writersAmerican philosophers of scienceCenter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellows