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Thomas Samuel Kuhn

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Philosophers

                                Western Philosophy
   20th-century philosophy
   Thomas Kuhn
         Name:       Thomas Samuel Kuhn
        Birth:       1922 July 18 ( Cincinnati, Ohio)
        Death:       1996 June 17
   School/tradition: Analytic philosophy
    Main interests:  Philosophy of science
    Notable ideas:   "paradigm shift," incommensurability, normal science
      Influenced:    Paul Feyerabend, almost all philosophy of science afterward

   Thomas Samuel Kuhn ( 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.

Life

   He was born to a Jewish family in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn,
   an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He obtained his
   bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943, his
   master's in 1946 and Ph.D. in 1949, and taught a course in the history
   of science there from 1948 until 1956 at the suggestion of Harvard
   president James Conant. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the
   University of California, 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 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.

   He suffered cancer of the bronchial tubes for the last two years of his
   life and died on 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 Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

   Thomas Kuhn is most famous for his book The Structure of Scientific
   Revolutions (SSR) (1962) in which he presented the idea 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 SSR, Kuhn also argues that rival
   paradigms are incommensurable -- that is, that it is not possible to
   understand one paradigm through the conceptual framework and
   terminology of another rival paradigm. For many critics, this thesis
   seemed to entail that theory choice is fundamentally irrational: if
   rival theories cannot be directly compared, then one cannot make a
   rational choice as to which one is better. Whether or not Kuhn's views
   had such relativistic consequences is the subject of much debate; Kuhn
   himself denied the accusation of relativism in the 3rd edition of SSR,
   and sought to clarify his views to avoid further misinterpretation.

   The book was originally printed as an article in the International
   Encyclopedia of Unified Science, published by the logical positivists
   of the Vienna Circle.

   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.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn"
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