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Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American
philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles,
introducing 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, they are competing and irreconcilable
accounts of reality. 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.
Life:
Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer,
and Minette Stroock Kuhn, both Jewish. From kindergarten through fifth grade,
he was educated at Lincoln School, a private progressive school in Manhattan,
which stressed independent thinking rather than learning facts and subjects.
The family then moved 40 miles north to the small town of Croton-on-Hudson
where, once again, he attended a private progressive school – Hessian
Hills School. It was here that, in sixth through ninth grade, he learned to
love mathematics.
He left Hessian Hills in 1937. He graduated from The Taft School in Watertown,
CT, in 1940. He obtained his SB degree in physics from Harvard University in
1943, where he also obtained SM and PhD degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949,
respectively, under the supervision of John Van Vleck. As he states in the
first few pages of the preface to the second edition of The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, his three years of total academic freedom as a
Harvard Junior Fellow were crucial in allowing him to switch from physics to
the history and philosophy of science. He later taught a course in the history
of science at Harvard from 1948 until 1956, at the suggestion of university
president James Conant. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of
California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history
department, being named Professor of the History of science in 1961. Kuhn
interviewed and tape recorded Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before Bohr's
death. At Berkeley, he wrote and published (in 1962) his best known and most
influential work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1964, he joined
Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History
of Science. He served as the president of the History of Science Society from
1969–70.
In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In
1994 Kuhn was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in 1996. Thomas Kuhn was
married twice, first to Kathryn Muhs with whom he had three children, then to
Jehane Barton Burns (Jehane R. Kuhn).
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Main article:
The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) was originally printed as an
article in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, published by the
logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. In this book, Kuhn argued that
science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but
undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "paradigm shifts"
(although he did not coin the phrase, he did contribute to its increase in
popularity), in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular
field is abruptly transformed. In general, science is broken up into three
distinct stages. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This
is followed by "normal science", when scientists attempt to enlarge
the central paradigm by "puzzle-solving". Guided by the paradigm,
normal science is extremely productive: "when the paradigm is successful,
the profession will have solved problems that its members could scarcely have
imagined and would never have undertaken without commitment to the
paradigm". In regard to experimentation and collection of data with a view
toward solving problems through the commitment to a paradigm, Kuhn states:
"The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the
laboratory are not 'the given' of experience but rather 'the collected with
difficulty.' They are not what the scientist sees—at least not before his
research is well advanced and his attention focused. Rather, they are concrete
indices to the content of more elementary perceptions, and as such they are
selected for the close scrutiny of normal research only because they promise
opportunity for the fruitful elaboration of an accepted paradigm. Far more
clearly than the immediate experience from which they in part derive,
operations and measurements are paradigm-determined. Science does not deal in
all possible laboratory manipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to
the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that
paradigm has partially determined.
As a result, scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete
laboratory manipulations." During the period of normal science, the
failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the
paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Popper's falsifiability
criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which
point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous
results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science.
In SSR, Kuhn also argues that rival paradigms are incommensurable—that is,
it is not possible to understand one paradigm through the conceptual framework
and terminology of another rival paradigm.
For many critics, for example David Stove (Popper and After, 1982), this thesis
seemed to entail that theory choice is fundamentally irrational: if rival
theories cannot be directly compared, then one cannot make a rational choice as
to which one is better. Whether Kuhn's views had such relativistic consequences
is the subject of much debate; Kuhn himself denied the accusation of relativism
in the third edition of SSR, and sought to clarify his views to avoid further
misinterpretation. Freeman Dyson has quoted Kuhn as saying "I am not a
Kuhnian!", referring to the relativism that some philosophers have
developed based on his work. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is
the single most widely cited book in the social sciences. The enormous impact
of Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the
vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides "paradigm shift",
Kuhn popularized the word "paradigm" itself from a term used in
certain forms of linguistics and the work of Georg Lichtenberg to its current
broader meaning, coined the term "normal science" to refer to the
relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm,
and was largely responsible for the use of the term "scientific
revolutions" in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of
time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single scientific revolution
in the late Renaissance.
The frequent use of the phrase "paradigm shift" has made scientists
more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that
Kuhn's analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced
that evolution. Kuhn's work has been extensively used in social science; for
instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International
Relations. Kuhn is credited as a foundational force behind the post-Mertonian
sociology of scientific knowledge. Kuhn's work has also been used in the Arts
and Humanities, such as by Matthew Edward Harris to distinguish between
scientific and historical communities (such as political or religious groups):
'political-religious beliefs and opinions are not epistemologically the same as
those pertaining to scientific theories'. This is because would-be scientists'
worldviews are changed through rigorous training, through the engagement
between what Kuhn calls 'exemplars' and the Global Paradigm. Kuhn's notions of
paradigms and paradigm shifts have been influential in understanding the
history of economic thought, for example the Keynesian revolution, and in
debates in political science.
A defense Kuhn gives against the objection that his account of science from
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions results in relativism can be
found in an essay by Kuhn called "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory
Choice." In this essay, he reiterates five criteria from the penultimate
chapter of SSR that determine (or help determine, more properly) theory choice:
Accurate – empirically adequate with experimentation and observation
Consistent – internally consistent, but also externally consistent with
other theories Broad Scope – a theory's consequences should extend beyond
that which it was initially designed to explain Simple – the simplest
explanation, principally similar to Occam's razor Fruitful – a theory
should disclose new phenomena or new relationships among phenomena He then goes
on to show how, although these criteria admittedly determine theory choice,
they are imprecise in practice and relative to individual scientists. According
to Kuhn, "When scientists must choose between competing theories, two men
fully committed to the same list of criteria for choice may nevertheless reach
different conclusions." For this reason, the criteria still are not
"objective" in the usual sense of the word because individual
scientists reach different conclusions with the same criteria due to valuing
one criterion over another or even adding additional criteria for selfish or
other subjective reasons. Kuhn then goes on to say, "I am suggesting, of
course, that the criteria of choice with which I began function not as rules,
which determine choice, but as values, which influence it."
Because Kuhn utilizes the history of science in his account of science, his
criteria or values for theory choice are often understood as descriptive
normative rules (or more properly, values) of theory choice for the scientific
community rather than prescriptive normative rules in the usual sense of the
word "criteria", although there are many varied interpretations of
Kuhn's account of science.
Post-Structure Philosophy:
Years after the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
Kuhn dropped the concept of a paradigm and began to focus on the semantic
aspects of scientific theories. In particular, Kuhn focuses on the taxonomic
structure of scientific kind terms. As a consequence, a scientific revolution
is not defined as a 'change of paradigm' anymore, but rather as a change in the
taxonomic structure of the theoretical language of science. Some scholars
describe this change as resulting from a 'linguistic turn'. In their book,
Andersen, Barker and Chen use some recent theories in cognitive psychology to
vindicate Kuhn's mature philosophy. Apart from dropping the concept of a
paradigm, Kuhn also began to look at the process of scientific specialisation.
In a scientific revolution, a new paradigm (or a new taxonomy) replaces the old
one; by contrast, specialisation leads to a proliferation of new specialties
and disciplines. This attention to the proliferation of specialties would make
Kuhn's model less 'revolutionary' and more 'evolutionary'. Some philosophers
claim that Kuhn attempted to describe different kinds of scientific change:
revolutions and specialty-creation. Others claim that the process of
specialisation is in itself a special case of scientific revolutions. It is
also possible to argue that, in Kuhn's model, science evolves through
revolutions.
Polanyi–Kuhn debate:
Although they used different terminologies, both Kuhn and Michael Polanyi
believed that scientists' subjective experiences made science a relativized
discipline. Polanyi lectured on this topic for decades before Kuhn published
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Supporters of Polanyi charged
Kuhn with plagiarism, as it was known that Kuhn attended several of Polanyi's
lectures, and that the two men had debated endlessly over epistemology before
either had achieved fame. After the charge of plagiarism, Kuhn acknowledged
Polanyi in the Second edition of The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions. Despite this intellectual alliance, Polanyi's work was
constantly interpreted by others within the framework of Kuhn's paradigm
shifts, much to Polanyi's (and Kuhn's) dismay.
Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award In honor of his legacy, the "Thomas Kuhn
Paradigm Shift Award" is awarded by the American Chemical Society to
speakers who present original views that are at odds with mainstream scientific
understanding. The winner is selected based on the novelty of the viewpoint and
its potential impact if it were to be widely accepted.
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