Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn
Kuhn in 1973
Born	Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-07-18)July 18, 1922 Cincinnati, Ohio, US
Died	June 17, 1996(1996-06-17) (aged 73) Cambridge, Massachusetts, US
Education	Harvard University (BSc, MSc, PhD)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy American philosophy
School	Analytic Historical turn[1] Historiographical externalism[2]
Institutions	Harvard University University of California, Berkeley Princeton University Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thesis	The Cohesive Energy of Monovalent Metals as a Function of Their Atomic Quantum Defects
Main interests	Philosophy of science History of science
Notable ideas	Paradigm shift Incommensurability Normal science Kuhn loss[3] Transcendental nominalism[4]

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (/kuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.

Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon "objectivity" alone. Science must account for subjective perspectives as well, since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/worldview of its researchers and participants.