Thomas Samuel Kuhn

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian of science and philosopher of science who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the philosophy of science. More than a million copies of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, were printed, and it became the most studied and discussed text in philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century.

Life

Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and his wife Minette Stroock Kuhn. His family was Jewish on both sides, although they were non-practicing. His father had been trained as a hydraulic engineer and had gone to Harvard. When he was six months old, his parents moved with him to New York City, and the young Kuhn attended progressive schools there and later in the upstate New York area.

Kuhn entered Harvard University in 1940 and obtained his bachelor's degree in physics after three years in 1943, his master's in 1946 and Ph.D. in 1949. From 1948 until 1956 he taught a course in the history of science there at the suggestion of Harvard president James Bryant Conant (then president of Harvard University). Conant would also be extremely influential in Kuhn’s career, encouraging him to write the book that would become The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (first. ed. pub. in 1962). After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California at 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 had entered Harvard as a physics major, intending to study theoretical physics. He did go on to get his degrees in physics. But as an undergraduate he took a course in philosophy and, although this was completely new to him, he was fascinated with it. He especially took to Kant. Later he would say that his own position was Kantian, but with moveable categories.

Sometime about 1947 Kuhn began teaching what had before been Conant’s course “Understanding Science.” This course could be thought of as an elementary course in the history and philosophy of science. This led Kuhn to begin focusing on the history of science. He also had his “Eureka moment” – maybe better called an “Aristotle moment” – in the summer of 1947. As a 1991 article in Scientific American put it, Kuhn “was working toward his doctorate in physics at Harvard …when he was asked to teach some science to undergraduate humanities majors. Searching for a simple case history that could illuminate the roots of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle's Physics and was astonished at how ‘wrong’ it was...[understood in Newtonian terms]. Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the window of his dormitory room... when suddenly Aristotle ‘made sense.’” Concerning what he found in Aristotle, Kuhn wrote, “How could [Aristotle’s] characteristic talents have deserted his so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had so deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? Those questions troubled me. I could easily believe that Aristotle had stumbled, but not that, on entering physics, he had totally collapsed. Might not the fault be mine, rather than Aristotle’s, I asked myself. Perhaps his words had not always meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine.” (The Road Since Structure, 16)

Kuhn reports that, in his window-gazing, “Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together.” As the Scientific American article put it, “Kuhn … realized that Aristotle's views of such basic concepts as motion and matter were totally unlike Newton's... Understood on its own terms, Aristotle's Physics ‘wasn't just bad Newton,’ Kuhn says; it was just different.” This insight would go on to underlie most of his subsequent work in history and philosophy of science. 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.

Kuhn 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 Copernican Revolution (1957)

In his lifetime, Kuhn published more than a hundred papers and reviews and five books. His first book – he had already published a few papers and reviews in various journals – was The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Harvard University Press, 1957), with a Forward by James Bryant Conant. This book began out of lectures he had given to the students at Harvard, and was completed after he went to Berkeley. It may be seen as a prolegomena to his later and most important and far more influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in that in Copernican Revolution Kuhn introduced many of the points that will be further developed there..

Kuhn emphasizes that the Copernican Revolution “event was plural. Its core was a transformation of mathematical astronomy, but it embraced conceptual changes in cosmology, physics, philosophy, and religion as well.” (p. vii) The Copernican revolution, Kuhn clams, shows “how and with what effect the concepts of many different fields are woven into a single fabric of thought.” (Ibid.) And “…filiations between distinct fields of thought appear in the period after the publication of Copernicus’ work. …[This work] could only be assimilated by men able to create a new physics, a new conception of space, and a new idea of man’s relation to God. …Specialized accounts [of the Copernican Revolution] are inhibited both by aim and method from examining the nature of these ties and their effects upon the growth of human knowledge.” (Ibid.)

Kuhn claims that this effort to show the Copernican Revolution’s plurality is “probably the book’s most important novelty.” (p. viii) But also it is novel in that it “repeatedly violates the institutional boundaries which separate the audience for ‘science’ from the audience for ‘history’ or ‘philosophy.’ Occasionally it may seem to be two books, one dealing with science, the other with intellectual history.”

The seven chapters of Copernican Revolution deal with what Kuhn calls “The Ancient Two-Sphere Universe,” “The Problem of the Planets [in Ptolemaic cosmology],” “The Two-Sphere Universe in Aristotelian Thought,” “Recasting the Tradition: Aristotle to Copernicus,” “Copernicus’ Innovation,” “The Assimilation of Copernican Astronomy,” and “The New Universe.”

Understanding of Kuhn's Work in Europe

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 Gaston 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 Louis Althusser's "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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