Even in the preface to the 1962 book, he said this was a first pass at a longer book. Many readers over the years have suggested that certain parts of Kuhn’s book required additional analysis, to clarify just what he meant by “paradigm,” for instance, and Kuhn worked fervently for decades to write follow-up essays and clarify. For all the authority people have invested in this book, to what extent should we regard it as a kind of work in progress?Ī. You wrote an essay in Nature earlier this year in which you said that “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” reminds you of the kind of “toy model” that physicists use - and Kuhn was a trained physicist - to simplify the world in a productive way. That wasn’t totally unique to Kuhn, but it was a pretty new way to think about the scientific endeavor and the notion of change over time. These radical ruptures, though rare, Kuhn thought, could really reshuffle the basic facts of science - because those facts, he argued, are not separable from the reigning ideas or theoretical explanations of the time. Sometimes we do change our conceptual filters. There could be a kind of progress of knowledge that was not a linear progress, nor progress toward a particular end.Ī related notion that Kuhn helped further was this idea that even very careful scientists take in the world through a lens of prior concepts, or engage in “theory-laden observation.” Science is driven by ideas to start with, and our engagement with the world is based on this active lens of ideas. But nonetheless, scientific knowledge could be a great deal more complicated and rich than the notion that we just get closer and closer to some sort of ultimate truth. One of them was that science might not be progressing toward a single truth - although Kuhn was at pains the rest of his life to say that didn’t mean he thought it was all made up, either. It’s not that every word in the book was without precedent, but it presented many ideas with a great cleverness and clarity. In retrospect, what was so innovative about them?Ī. Over 50 years, we’ve become highly acclimated to Kuhn’s ideas. MIT News spoke with David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science, about Kuhn’s work. 7, the Institute hosted a symposium on Kuhn’s thought and influence, on the 50th anniversary of his celebrated book.

Kuhn spent the last 17 years of his career at MIT, until his death in 1996.

To Kuhn, this also suggested that scientific knowledge does not consist of a straightforward accumulation of objective facts - a controversial view often seized upon by skeptics of science, to Kuhn’s chagrin. Kuhn asserted that most research takes place during periods of “normal science,” which are occasionally upended when scientists find a new and more compelling framework, or paradigm, for interpreting known observations - such as Newton’s overturning of Aristotelian ideas about motion. If you’ve ever talked about a “paradigm shift,” you’ve channeled Thomas Kuhn, the historian and philosopher of science whose landmark 1962 bestseller, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” changed how people discuss the scientific enterprise.

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