Critique of Kuhn(USE AS GUIDE ONLY)

Critique of Kuhn(USE AS GUIDE ONLY)

Critique of Kuhn(USE AS GUIDE ONLY)

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Running Head: CRITIQUE OF KUHN Critique of Kuhn
The University of Oklahoma
CRITIQUE OF KUHN
Critique of Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn was a physicist who is often considered to be one of the most influential
philosophers of science from the twentieth century. In 1962, the essay Kuhn wrote about his
revolutionary and controversial paradigm concept was published under the title The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions. This book became one of the most cited academic books of all time,
being used as a source for scientists, philosophers and historians alike (Bird, 2013).
Kuhn set about trying to make sense of important scientific happenings of the past
through his own knowledge of events, making the history and philosophy of science an
important aspect of his paradigm concept. It was through his conceptualization of historical
accomplishments that Kuhn was able to come up with his revolutionary new theory (Thoma,
2009). Even then, Kuhn’s paradigm concept and his contributions to the philosophy of science
were so controversial that numerous doctrines rejected his theories outright, such as those in the
fields of non-relativistic and non-quantum physics (O’Rafferty, 2011). Several other key
doctrines were influenced by Kuhn’s work in a positive manner, thus causing the beginning of
several new scientific fields, including a new way of looking at science through its history, such
as the social study of science and technology (O’Rafferty, 2011).
This development resulted in Kuhn becoming important, not because his concept was
able to spread across the scientific community in such a short period of time, but because he
raised questions about how scholars perceive their research. Prior to the introduction of
Kuhn’s concepts, the traditional way of looking at and interpreting our scientific history was
of the Whiggian variety whose proponents believe that there is no

Angela K Harris
10 Feb 2014