Thomas S. Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn
Frank Pajares -
mpajare@emory.edu
Thomas
Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in
Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He received a
Ph. D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949
and remained there as an assistant professor of
general education and history of science.  Of the five
books and countless articles he published, Kuhn's
most renown work is The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, which he wrote while
a graduate student in theoretical physics at
Harvard:
Outline
and Study Guide
Throughout
thirteen succinct but thought-provoking chapters,
Kuhn argued that science is not a steady,
cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead,
science is "a series of peaceful interludes
punctuated by intellectually violent
revolutions," which he described as
"the tradition-shattering complements to the
tradition-bound activity of normal science."
After such revolutions, "one conceptual
world view is replaced by another."
Kuhn was responsible for popularizing the term
paradigm, which he described as essentially a
collection of beliefs shared by scientists, a set
of agreements about how problems are to be
understood. A fundamental theme of Kuhn's
argument is that the typical developmental
pattern of a mature science is the successive
transition from one paradigm to another through a
process of revolution. When a paradigm shift
takes place, "a scientist's world is
qualitatively transformed [and] quantitatively
enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact
or theory."
http://mfp.es.emory.edu/Kuhnsnap.html
Thomas Kuhn
Andreas
Ehrencrona-
andreas.ehrencrona@home.se
Thomas
Kuhn changed the view of scientific progress
totally. Where once the history of science was
seen as a steady progression where theory is
added to theory until the truth is found, Kuhn
saw a series of revolutionary changes of the
world-view of science, where the view of one
period had very little in common with the
previous. Most importantly, he questioned the
possibility for science ever to find a truth.
http://cgi.student.nada.kth.se/cgi-bin/d95-aeh/get/CSS/kuhneng
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