The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought
(For scientist and layman alike this book provides vivid e...)
For scientist and layman alike this book provides vivid evidence that the Copernican Revolution has by no means lost its significance today. Few episodes in the development of scientific theory show so clearly how the solution to a highly technical problem can alter our basic thought processes and attitudes. Understanding the processes which underlay the Revolution gives us a perspective, in this scientific age, from which to evaluate our own beliefs more intelligently. With a constant keen awareness of the inseparable mixture of its technical, philosophical, and humanistic elements, Mr. Kuhn displays the full scope of the Copernican Revolution as simultaneously an episode in the internal development of astronomy, a critical turning point in the evolution of scientific thought, and a crisis in Western man's concept of his relation to the universe and to God.
(With The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn challe...)
With The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn challenged long-standing linear notions of scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don’t arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation but that the revolutions in science, those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of "normal science," as he called it. Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in our biotech age.
Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912
(The book not only deals with a topic of importance and in...)
The book not only deals with a topic of importance and interest to all scientists but is also a polished literary work, described (accurately) by one of its original reviewers as a scientific detective story.
The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview
(Thomas Kuhn will undoubtedly be remembered primarily for ...)
Thomas Kuhn will undoubtedly be remembered primarily for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book that introduced one of the most influential conceptions of scientific progress to emerge during the twentieth century. The Road Since Structure, assembled with Kuhn's input before his death in 1996, follows the development of his thought through the later years of his life: collected here are several essays extending and rethinking the perspectives of Structure as well as an extensive, fascinating autobiographical interview in which Kuhn discusses the course of his life and philosophy.
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science whose controversial 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.
Background
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States, to the family of Samuel Louis Kuhn and Minette Stroock. His parents called him Tom. When he was a few months old, the family moved to New York. His younger brother Roger was born three years later. Kuhn's father was a Cincinnati-born industrial engineer and investment consultant. A graduate of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he had fought in World War I. His mother came from a wealthy New York family. A graduate of Vassar College, she wrote unpaid articles for progressive organizations, worked as a freelance editor, and was a patron of the arts. Both Kuhn's parents were active in left-wing politics and both were of Jewish descent, although neither of them practiced their religion.
Education
From kindergarten through fifth grade, Thomas Kuhn was educated at Lincoln School, a private progressive school in Manhattan where independent thinking rather than learning facts and subjects was practiced. His father grew impatient when, at age seven, his son could not still read or write. With a little coaching from his father, however, Tom was soon reading.
The family moved 40 miles (64.37 kilometers) north to the small town of Croton-on-Hudson where, once again, Kuhn attended a progressive private school – Hessian Hills School. It was here that, in sixth through ninth grade, he learned to love mathematics. Influenced by radical teachers, he also hoped to join the leftist American Student Union. Before joining it, members had to swear an oath never to fight for America. After agonizing over this, and talking to his father, he decided he could not sign. He left Hessian Hills in 1937.
For tenth grade, Kuhn moved to Solebury School, a private boarding school in Solebury Township, Pennsylvania. His final school was another private boarding school, Taft School, in Watertown, Connecticut.
A straight-A student, Kuhn was admitted to Harvard University, his father’s alma mater. He believed this was a great honor, and it was only years later he learned that nearly everyone who applied when he did was admitted to Harvard. He knew he would eventually have to make a choice between majoring in Mathematics or Physics. His father told him it would be easier to get a job as a physicist, so even before leaving for Harvard, Kuhn decided he would major in Physics.
Arriving in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the fall of 1940, 18-year-old Kuhn experienced a happy improvement in his social life. In his final prep school years, he had started to feel like an outsider looking in. His frequent moves between high schools must have been unsettling. At Harvard, he felt like he belonged.
However, physics proved harder than Kuhn expected, and he scored a C in his first exam. Worried, he asked a professor if he had any future in the subject. The professor told Kuhn he needed to spend time plowing through more problems, making sure he could do them. Kuhn took the advice and scored A at the end of his freshman year.
In Kuhn's sophomore year, United States entered World War II. Kuhn decided to speed up his degree by attending classes in summer. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Physics summa cum laude (with the highest honor) in 1943. In addition to studying Physics, he spent his final year as head of the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson, the college newspaper.
Kuhn returned to Harvard after the war in Europe ended and graduated with a master’s degree in Physics in 1946 and doctorate in 1949. His Doctor of Philosophy thesis was The Cohesive Energy of Monovalent Metals as a Function of the Atomic Quantum Defects.
Even before Kuhn returned to America, his enthusiasm for physics had been dwindling. He continued studying it though, because it was the most convenient way for him to get a doctorate.
In the summer of 1943, Thomas Kuhn joined the Radio Research Laboratory’s theoretical group. Based at Harvard, his group was tasked with devising countermeasures against enemy radar. He was soon sent to work in a laboratory in the United Kingdom. Later he traveled with a Royal Air Force officer to France for a few weeks to study recently captured German radar installations, then carried on into Germany itself.
In September 1948 Kuhn was appointed a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He then turned from physics to reading in the history and philosophy of science, which he had by then decided would be his field of research and teaching, and about which he so far knew little. He had in 1947 given the lectures on early mechanics, from Aristotle to Galileo, but then did not teach until in 1950 he again lectured in the natural science course, now called Research Patterns in Physical Science. Over a period of years, a number of case histories for the natural science course were published separately and eventually collected in two volumes called Harvard Case Studies in Experimental Science (1957). But these were strictly experimental sciences and included nothing of Kuhn’s courses in theoretical sciences, mechanics and, later, astronomy. When his Junior Fellowship ended in 1951, he was appointed Instructor in the General Education program and in 1952 Assistant Professor of General Education and the History of Science. He had written a series of lectures, delivered at the Lowell Institute in 1951, called The Quest for Physical Theory: Problems in the Methodology of Scientific Research, his first attempt at presenting his ideas about the historical development of science, but decided that they were not yet ready for publication. But one of the courses in the natural science program, the Copernican Revolution, did lead to a publication. In 1954, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a book on the subject and to begin work on a project called "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," related to his Lowell Lectures, that he had consented to write for the long-standing, since 1938, publication of the Vienna Circle, now in the United States, the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Each was to take longer than anticipated. By late 1955, the Copernican Revolution was still an uncompleted manuscript of over 500 pages, the work on Scientific Revolutions was not begun, and it was becoming clear that Kuhn did not have a future at Harvard. Fortunately, the prospect of an appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, appeared in early 1956, and in the spring he was offered an Assistant Professorship of the History of Science in the Departments of History and Philosophy. He accepted, and shortly before his move to Berkeley, Harvard University Press accepted the book on the Copernican Revolution, which appeared in 1957.
During the period he was writing Structure, in 1960, Kuhn received an offer of a professorship in the history of science at Johns Hopkins with generous support and the promise of three or four additional appointments. When he brought this to the attention of the History and Philosophy Departments at Berkeley, he was asked what would be required to keep him. He mentioned promotion to professor, additional appointments, and a Doctor of Philosophy field in the history of science within philosophy, which he considered his principal department, in which he had students of the history of science. The results were curious. He was informed that he would be promoted, that there would be an additional appointment, but that the philosophy department had no interest in a field in the history of science or in having him continue as a member of the department as he was not considered a philosopher. This really happened, and so the philosophy department at Berkeley has the distinction of having thrown out the most distinguished philosopher of science since, well, make your own choice, certainly of our time. Since he had, perhaps too optimistically, declined the offer from Hopkins, he stayed, but Berkeley was of less and less interest. In 1963, he accepted an offer from the Program in History and Philosophy of Science at Princeton, represented principally by Charles Gillispie in history and Carl Hempel in philosophy, and began there in the fall of 1964. The program, affiliated with the Departments of History and Philosophy, turned out to be well-intentioned but did not really work. The students, of which there were a fair number, called the program history or philosophy of science, few of the students were up to the technical level of Kuhn’s courses, fewer still up to writing a dissertation under his direction, and eventually the philosophy part of the program was discontinued. In 1972, he took up a half-time appointment at The Institute for Advanced Study as a long-term member, and for the rest of the time he was in Princeton, that is where he worked on his largest, most difficult, and most important historical study. This in itself has a history. During the period 1961-1964 at Berkeley, Kuhn was the director of the Sources for the History of Quantum Physics, defined as the period 1898-1933, later extended to 1950, supported by the National Science Foundation and supervised by a joint committee of the American Physical Society and the American Philosophical Society. The assistant director was John Heilbron, the senior editor and archivist Paul Forman, and Lini Allen the administrative officer.
In 1979 Kuhn left Princeton for Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, in 1983 as Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor. Kuhn retired from teaching in 1991 and became an emeritus professor at MIT.
Thomas Samuel Kuhn is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential. His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time. Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines but also inaugurated a new style of the philosophy of science that brought it closer to the history of science. His account of the development of science held that science enjoys periods of stable growth punctuated by revisionary revolutions. To this thesis, Kuhn added the controversial "incommensurability thesis," that theories from differing periods suffer from certain deep kinds of failure of comparability.
During Kuhn's career, he received numerous awards and accolades. He was the recipient of honorary degrees from around a dozen academic institutions, such as the University of Chicago, Columbia University, University of Padua, and the University of Notre Dame. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Science - the most prestigious society for United States scientists - and was an honorary life member of the New York Academy of Science and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He was president of the History of Science Society from 1968 to 1970 and the society awarded him its highest honor, the Sarton Medal, in 1982. Kuhn was also the recipient in 1977 of the Howard T. Behrman Award for distinguished achievement in the humanities and in 1983 of the celebrated John Desmond Bernal award.
By ancestry, Kuhn was Jewish. By choice, he was an agnostic.
Politics
Thomas Kuhn's ideas influenced the development of political science though his personal political views are not widely known.
Views
Kuhn was best known for debunking the common belief that science develops by the accumulation of individual discoveries. In the summer of 1947 something happened that shattered the image of science he had received as a physicist. He was asked to interrupt his doctorate physics project to lecture on the origins of Newton's physics. Predecessors of Newton such as Galileo and Descartes were raised within the Aristotelian scientific tradition. Kuhn was shocked to find in Aristotle's physics precious little a Newtonian could agree with or even make sense of. He asked himself how Aristotle, so brilliant on other topics, could be so confused about motion and why his views on motion were taken so seriously by later generations. He realized that he had been misreading Aristotle by assuming a Newtonian point of view. Taught that science progresses cumulatively, he had sought to find what Aristotle contributed to Newton's mechanics. This effort was wrong-headed, because the two men had basically different ways of approaching the study of motion.
For example, Aristotle's interest in change in general led him to regard motion as a change of state, whereas Newton's interest in elementary particles, thought to be in continuous motion, led him to regard motion as a state. That continuous motion requires explanation by appeal to some force keeping it in motion was taken as obvious by Aristotle. But Newton thought that continued motion at a certain speed needed no explanation in terms of forces. Newton invoked the gravitational force to explain the acceleration and advanced a law that an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an external force.
This discovery turned Kuhn's interest from physics to the history of physics and eventually to the bearing of the history of science on the philosophy of science. His working hypothesis that reading a historical text requires sensitivity to changes in meaning provided new insight into the work of such great physicists as Boyle, Lavoisier, Dalton, Boltzmann, and Plank. This hypothesis was a generalization of his finding that Aristotle and Newton worked on different research projects with different starting points which eventuated in different meanings for basic terms such as "motion" or "force." Most people probably think that science has exhibited a steady accumulation of knowledge. But Kuhn's study of the history of physics showed this belief to be false for the simple reason that different research traditions have different basic views that are in conflict. Scientists of historically successive traditions differ about what phenomena ought to be included in their studies, about the nature of the phenomena about what aspects of the phenomena do or do not need explanation, and even about what counts as a good explanation or a plausible hypothesis or a rigorous test of the theory.
Especially striking to Kuhn was the fact that scientists rarely argued explicitly about these basic research decisions. Scientific theories were popularly viewed as based entirely on inferences from observational evidence. But no amount of experimental testing can dictate these decisions because they are logically prior to testing by their nature. What, if not observations, explains the consensus of a community of scientists within the same tradition at a given time? Kuhn boldly conjectured that they must share common commitments, not based on observation or logic alone, in which these matters are implicitly settled. Most scientific practice is a complex mopping-up operation, based on group commitments, which extends the implications of the most recent theoretical breakthrough. Here, at last, was the concept for which Kuhn had been searching: the concept of normal science taking for granted a paradigm, the locus of shared commitments.
In 1962 Kuhn published his landmark book on scientific revolutions, which was eventually translated into 16 languages and sold over a million copies. He coined the term "paradigm" to refer to accepted achievements such as Newton's Principia which contains examples of good scientific practice. These examples include law, theory, application, and instrumentation. They function as models for further work. The result is a coherent research tradition. In his postscript to the second edition, Kuhn pointed out the two senses of "paradigm" used in his book. In the narrow sense, it is one or more achievement wherein scientists find examples of the kind of work they wish to emulate, called "exemplars." In the broad sense, it is the shared body of preconceptions controlling the expectations of scientists, called a "disciplinary matrix." Persistent use of exemplars as models gives rise to a disciplinary matrix that determines the problems selected for study and the sorts of answers acceptable to the scientific community.
Using the paradigm concept, Kuhn developed a theory of scientific change. A tradition is pre-scientific if it has no paradigm. A scientific tradition typically passes through a sequence of normal science-crisis-revolution-new normal science. Normal science is puzzle-solving governed by a paradigm accepted uncritically. Difficulties are brushed aside and blamed on the failure of the scientist to extend the paradigm properly. A crisis begins when scientists view these difficulties as stemming from their paradigm, not themselves. If the crisis is not resolved, a revolution sets in, but the old paradigm is not given up until it can be replaced by a new one. Then new normal science begins and the cycle is repeated. Just when to accept a new paradigm and when to stick to the old one is a matter not subject to proof, although good reasons can be adduced for both options. Scientific rationality is not found in rules of scientific method but in the collective judgment of the scientific community. We must give up the notion that science progresses cumulatively toward the truth about reality; after a revolution, it merely replaces one way of seeing the world with another.
Kuhn's theory of scientific change was the most widely influential philosophy of science since that of his mentor, Sir Karl Popper. Kuhn's claims were much discussed by scientists, who generally accepted them; by sociologists, who took them to elucidate the subculture of scientists; by historians, who found cases of scientific change not fitting his model; and by philosophers, who generally abhorred Kuhn's historical relativism about knowledge but accepted the need for their theories of science to do justice to its history. Kuhn was often perturbed by those who sought to - in his view - apply his ideas to areas where it was inappropriate.
Quotations:
"To my complete surprise, that exposure to out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically undermined some of my basic conceptions about the nature of science and the reasons for its special success."
"Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded."
"Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice."
"Normal science, the puzzle-solving activity we have just examined, is a highly cumulative enterprise, eminently successful in its aim, the steady extension of the scope and precision of scientific knowledge."
"Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way."
Membership
Thomas Kuhn was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the History of Science Society, the Harvard Society of Fellows, the International Academy of the History of Science, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
National Academy of Sciences
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United States
German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
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Germany
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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United States
History of Science Society
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United States
Harvard Society of Fellows
,
United States
International Academy of the History of Science
European Academy of Sciences and Arts
Personality
While studying for his doctorate, Kuhn became rather isolated from other people, repeating the experience of his final high school years. Working in an almost all-male setting, he worried his mother by not dating women. He agreed to undergo psychoanalysis. Looking back on the experience, he said he hated the counselor, who would fall asleep during sessions. The psychoanalysis ended because the counselor left town and Kuhn got married.
Interests
cooking, riding roller coasters
Philosophers & Thinkers
Immanuel Kant, Alexandre Koyré, Michael Polanyi, John Hasbrouck Van Vleck, Ludwik Fleck, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Anneliese Maier, Hélène Metzger, Émile Meyerson, Jean Piaget, Karl Popper, Norwood Russell Hanson, Herbert Butterfield
Connections
Thomas Kuhn married Kathryn Muhs in 1948. His wife, like his mother, was a graduate of Vassar College. She typed his doctoral thesis. They had two daughters and a son - Sarah, Elizabeth, and Nathaniel. The couple divorced in 1978. In 1981, age 59, Kuhn married Jehane Barton Burns.
