Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Thomas S. Kuhn's second monograph, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is the most widely read and most influential book on the philosophy of science of the twentieth century. It spawned the ubiquitous use of the term “paradigm” in popular culture, including cartoons and business management courses, and a million copies have been sold in almost twenty languages. The central thesis of the book is that the nature of scientific development had been seriously misunderstood by philosophers and scientists, and that, in the words of the opening sentence: “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” The image he sought to transform was one in which science is cumulative, varying in the speed of its progress, but always moving forward, an image in which scientific controversies are a small and unimportant part of the process, friction in the wheels of progress. The contrasting image he championed portrays mature sciences as alternating between two kinds of change. The first are periods of cumulative progress in which scientists apply generally accepted theories to the unresolved questions in a domain according to a shared understanding of what constitutes a reasonable scientific question and of what criteria are used to judge answers. This “normal science” ... log in or subscribe to read full text