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Thomas Kuhn

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Thomas Kuhn was an American philosopher and historian of science, born in Cincinnati in 1922 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1996. Trained originally as a physicist, he argued in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science does not progress by smoothly accumulating facts but alternates between long stretches of normal science working within a shared paradigm and rare, disruptive paradigm shifts when that shared framework breaks down and is replaced, a picture that put the words paradigm and paradigm shift into everyday use well beyond science itself. Carried under scientist alongside Popper on the same reasoning this file's header gives.

Facts
Birth Year
1922 1
Field
History and philosophy of science 1
Cross-Tradition Connections

Proposed

Works In

Sources
1. Thomas Kuhn (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Alexander Bird, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004SEP, Bird, first pub. 2004
Quote, SEP, Bird, first pub. 2004
The central idea of this extraordinarily influential and controversial book is that the development of science is driven, in normal periods of science, by adherence to what Kuhn called a paradigm.
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