Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions

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The aim of this essay is to provide a summary and critique of Thomas S. Kuhn’s groundbreaking thesis ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.’ This will be done by analyzing his concepts of ‘paradigm’, ‘normal science’ and ‘scientific revolutions.’ Following the overview I will present the example of ‘The Copernican Revolution’ to empirically show a paradigm shift. The rest of the essay is concerned specifically with critically examining Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm and the incommensurability between them. I will show that to define paradigm is a never ending task however this should not hinder the usefulness of the concept itself.

Before Kuhn’s book was written, the commonly held position by scientists and philosophers of science, such as Mach and Otswald , about the structure of science; was that it involved linear progression as a result of an incremental accumulation of knowledge from the activities undertaken by members of the scientific community. They thought that as generations of scientists observed more and more, their understanding of a particular scientific fact would become better refined through an ever growing stockpile of facts, theories and methods. The aim of the historian of science would be to pin point the man and the moment in time a further discovery was made; whilst also describing the obstacles that inhibited scientific progression.

Then in 1962, Kuhn’s revolutionary book challenged the prevailing model of the history of science and argued for an episodic structure in which periods of conceptual continuity in normal science are interrupted by periods of revolutionary science.

I will begin by outlining the core concepts that Kuhn presents at the beginning of his thesis. The backbone of Kuh...

... middle of paper ...

... with its easy and friendly applicability means that it fulfils the aims of which Kuhn wanted. To tell the story of how science was structured.

Bibliography

Bonini, C. P. (1963). Simulation of information and decision systems in the firm. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall.

Kuhn, T. S. (1962. Second Edition, enlarged, 1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago.

Masterman, M. (1970). The Nature of a Paradigm. In I. Lakatos, & A. Musgrave (Eds.), Criticism and The Growth of Knowledge (pp. 59-90). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shapere, D. (1964). Review: The structure of Scientific Revolutions. The Philosophical Review , 73 (3), 383-394.

Shapere, D. (1971, May). The Paradigm Concept. Science , 172 (3984), pp. 706-709.

Weinberg, S. (1998). Scientific Revolutions. New York Review of Books , XLV (15).

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