Essays on Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn, who was once a physicist, now is regarded as one of the most important historians and philosophers of science. His account of science, paradigms and scientific revolutions described in his magnum opus The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is perhaps the most notable and studied document in the field of philosophy of science and is also the main subject of this work. In his historical account of science, Thomas Kuhn distinguishes four main milestones or stages, of which the last three are cyclical in their nature. They are pre-science, normal science, crisis, and the scientific revolution. Pre-science is ...

Questions

The Lunar Society of Birmingham was an informal society of industrialists and philosophers that met on full moon nights because the moonlight made traveling easier. Members included Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, James Watt, and Josiah Wedgwood. Erasmus Darwin was Charles Darwin’s father and the Lunar Society often met at his home. This exposed young Charles Darwin early on in life to creative scientific thinkers that surely influenced his studies in later years. .

What purpose did Linnaeus system of binomial nomenclature (also known as his binary system) serve? Carl Linnaeus has been called “the Father ...

According to Thomas Kuhn, science normally progresses in four stages. The first stage is known as the Pre-Paradigm Science. This phase of scientific advancement is the science practice lacking a core set of methods or propositions. In this stage some the paradigms are somewhat vague and for that reason new observations can be accommodated since the indefinite form of the paradigm does not clearly define what are acceptable or unacceptable outcomes. Discovery takes place as an outcome of the more or less random observations made and employed to create a paradigm view that is more structured. The second stage is ...

Kuhn Cycle presented by Thomas Kuhn in early 1960’s. This cycle was a very sophisticated method of telling about the science and its progress. Kuhn presented a model elaborating the ways how a science can contribute in the progress of a society. That model was named as “structure of a scientific revolution.” According to that model, Kuhn negated the outdated ideas about the progress of science. According to Kuhn, the world is relying on the idea in the field of science, and that idea portrays the slow and steady innovations and addition to the existing scientific progress. So Kuhn challenged that ideas and ...

The Scientific Revolution has been subjected to philosophical evaluation for quite a long time. Among the most prominent people that have subjected the scientific revolution to a thorough thought process is Thomas Kuhn. According to Thomas Kuhn, scientific history has been characterized by changes in the scientific outlook (Dilworth 70). This can be best explained by the fact that the scientific community usually accepts a dominant paradigm, until anomalies arise. As time passes, scientists question the paradigm itself from which new ideas and theories emerge, further changing the outlook. In support of Kuhn’s views, this paper seeks to explain that the ...

How Science Progresses According to Thomas Kuhn

In years when all people saw scientific progress as a constant development in an array of putative theories and facts, American historian and science philosopher Thomas Kuhn brought challenges to the prevailing scientific views. In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn espoused the notion that periods of revolutionary science interrupt the theoretical continuity in normal science and the encounter of irregularities during those periods brings a new paradigm that could alter the rules and directions of the research, raise questions of some old data, and lead to a phase further than the usual puzzle-solving of normal science (Emory University, ...