Thomas Kuhn?

Question

Scientific Revolution

Answer 1

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (pronounced [kuːn])(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.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), by Thomas Kuhn, is an analysis of the history of science. Its publication was a landmark event in the sociology of knowledge, and popularized the terms paradigm and paradigm shift.

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Answer 2

Thomas Kuhn seems to be an author in the area of the philosophy of science. One of his books was The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in which he suggested that 'science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he calls "paradigm shifts", in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages'
.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 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.

'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'.

Answer 3

Fantastic book. Puts forth the idea that society works in paradigms. Each paradigm can work around little anomalies until an anomaly comes along that the paradigm cannot support, then the paradigm falls apart and is replaced by a new paradigm. Makes it difficult to find "truth", since it is different depending on the paradigm!