Thomas Samuel Kuhn

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American intellectual who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the philosophy of science.

Life

Descendant of a Jewish family, Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He obtained his bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943, his master's in 1946 and Ph.D. in 1949, and taught a course in the history of science there from 1948 until 1956 at the suggestion of Harvard 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. In 1964 he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991.

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

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

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

Thomas Kuhn is most famous for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) (1962) in which he presented the idea that science does not evolve gradually toward truth, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he calls "paradigm shifts." This book was originally printed as an article in the International Encyclopedia for Unified Science which was published by the Vienna circle also known as logical positivists. The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the revolution it brought about even in the vocabulary of the history of science: besides "paradigm shifts," Kuhn raised the word "paradigm" itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics 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.

In France, Kuhn's conception of science 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 historical conditions of possibility of the scientific discourse. (Foucault, in fact, was most directly influenced by Bachelard, who had developed independently a view of the history of scientific change similar to Kuhn's.) Thus, they do not consider science as isolated from society as they argue that Kuhn does. In contrast to Kuhn, Althusser's conception of science is that it is cumulative, even though this cumulativity is discontinuous (see his concept of "epistemological break") whereas Kuhn considers various paradigms as incommensurable.

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

"Post-Kuhnian" philosophy of science produced extensive responses to and critiques of the apparently relativistic and skeptical implications of Kuhn's work—implications Kuhn himself disowned.

Bibliography

• Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn Princeton and London: Princeton University Press and Acumen Press, 2000.
• Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
• Kuhn, T.S. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.
• Kuhn, T.S. The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science. Isis, 52(1961): 161-193.
• Kuhn, T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) ISBN 0226458083
• Kuhn, T.S. "The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research". Pp. 347-69 in A. C. Crombie (ed.). Scientific Change (Symposium on the History of Science, University of Oxford, 9-15 July 1961). New York and London: Basic Books and Heineman, 1963.
• Kuhn, T.S. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977)
• Kuhn, T.S. Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ISBN 0226458008
• Kuhn, T.S. The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0226457982

See also

• Important publications in philosophy of science
• History and philosophy of science
• John L. Heilbron

External links

• Thomas Kuhn (Biography, Outline of Structure of Scientific Revolutions)
• Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm (obituary by Lawrence Van Gelder, New York Times, 19 June 1996)
• Thomas S. Kuhn (obituary, The Tech p9 vol 116 no 28, 26 June 1996)
• Thomas Kuhn at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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