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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Structure-of-scientific-revolutions-1st-ed-pb.png
Cover of the first edition
Author Thomas S. Kuhn
Cover artist Ted Lacey
Country United States
Language English
Subject History of science
Publisher University of Chicago Press
Publication date
1962 (50th Anniversary Edition: 2012)
Media type Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages 264
ISBN
501
LC Class Q175.K95

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; second edition 1970; third edition 1996; fourth edition 2012) is a book about the history of science by philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of scientific knowledge and triggered an ongoing worldwide assessment and reaction in—and beyond—those scholarly communities. Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in "normal science". Normal scientific progress was viewed as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. The discovery of "anomalies" during revolutions in science leads to new paradigms. New paradigms then ask new questions of old data, move beyond the mere "puzzle-solving" of the previous paradigm, change the rules of the game and the "map" directing new research.

For example, Kuhn's analysis of the Copernican Revolution emphasized that, in its beginning, it did not offer more accurate predictions of celestial events, such as planetary positions, than the Ptolemaic system, but instead appealed to some practitioners based on a promise of better, simpler, solutions that might be developed at some point in the future. Kuhn called the core concepts of an ascendant revolution its "paradigms" and thereby launched this word into widespread analogical use in the second half of the 20th century. Kuhn's insistence that a paradigm shift was a mélange of sociology, enthusiasm and scientific promise, but not a logically determinate procedure, caused an uproar in reaction to his work. Kuhn addressed concerns in the 1969 postscript to the second edition. For some commentators Kuhn's book introduced a realistic humanism into the core of science while for others the nobility of science was tarnished by Kuhn's introduction of an irrational element into the heart of its greatest achievements.


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