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Birth and Early Years
Born in 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio; Thomas Kuhn started his academic career at Harvard University by earning his bachelor's degree in 1943 and his master's in 1946 in physics. Later he would acquire his Ph.D for physics in 1949 and would begin teaching courses centered on historical case studies which would expose him to historical scientific texts that would further influence him in his later work. Starting as far back as Aristotle, he would develop a fascination for their work. -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Starting to compile his ideas as a graduate student, Kuhn would eventually publish his ideas on the progress of science into his book known as " The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". His thoughts, taken down in this revolutionary work, would argue to the actual progression of scientific advancement and how it isn't necessarily a steady slope upward. Instead, said advancement is intermittent with irregular stretches of standard scientific work which could be interrupted with change. -
Establish the Paradigm
The process that is explained in his work describes certain periods in a cycle of progress for a specific aspect in scientific study. Starting with a pre-paradigm or pre-science stage, there is a lacking consensus in schools of thought and procedure, which will eventually become more uniform in its nature to establish a "disciplinary matrix' or paradigm as a model for those scientists to follow and develop common procedures and practices to follow, resulting in normal science to commence. -
Revolution and "The Shift"
This normal science or "puzzle-solving" will continue to progress in supporting the paradigm until there is confidence lost in the matrix to solve serious issues that can arise in several anomalies. This widespread failure is categorized as a "crisis". This crisis will result in the specific scientific revolution to develop a new matrix or paradigm to replace the old one. Once changed, normal science would resume. With these ideas, Kuhn would change the way we think of the scientific process. -
Works Cited and Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL7PA51Qs8A Bird, Alexander, "Thomas Kuhn", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/thomas-kuhn/. Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Theory and Reality : An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. University of Chicago Press, 2003. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip&db=nlebk&AN=324622&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
