Thomas Kuhn

1922-1996 · American · Philosophy of Science, History of Science

Normal science... is low on innovation and high on dogma.

Thomas Kuhn trained as a physicist at Harvard, but the moment that changed him came while preparing a lecture on Aristotle's physics. Reading it as failed Newtonian mechanics, he found it absurd — until he stopped judging the past by the present and suddenly saw a coherent system on its own terms. That gestalt switch became the seed of the most disruptive book in the philosophy of science.

Topics Thomas Kuhn addresses

• paradigm
• normal science
• scientific revolutions
• paradigm shift
• anomaly
• crisis
• incommensurability
• exemplars
• disciplinary matrix
• puzzle-solving
• theory-ladenness of observation
• world change
• gestalt switch
• theory choice
• scientific progress
• the essential tension
• meaning variance
• lexical taxonomy
• scientific community
• the Copernican revolution
• normal and revolutionary science
• relativism
• constructivism
• cumulative versus non-cumulative progress

Converse with Thomas Kuhn on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Thomas Kuhn's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.