Thomas Kuhn's thesis, from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), that successive scientific paradigms can be incommensurable: they may use shared terms with different meanings, pose different questions as legitimate, and be evaluated by different standards, so that comparing them is not the straightforward accumulation of evidence normal science assumes. Kuhn argued that a scientific revolution is less a matter of one paradigm being simply proven and the other refuted than of a Gestalt-like shift in how practitioners see their field, which is why he compared paradigm change to a change of world view rather than to ordinary theory testing. Critics, including Popper and later philosophers of science, pressed Kuhn on whether incommensurability collapses into relativism about scientific truth, a reading Kuhn resisted in his later work.
Facts
Origin YearThomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962. Connections
Associated With
Source Thomas Kuhn (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
In Branch
Sources
1. Thomas Kuhn (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Thomas Kuhn, section on incommensurability
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996) is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential.
Thomas Kuhn, on Structure
His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time.
- Associated With: Thomas Kuhn
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