# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/thomas-kuhn
# Generated: 2026-08-31T13:49:25.374Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/thomas-kuhn"
name: "Thomas Kuhn"
slug: "thomas-kuhn"
description: "He gave us \"paradigm shift\" — and then spent decades watching people misuse it. Kuhn argued that science doesn't crawl forward; it jolts, breaks, reinvents its own rules when the old framework can't hold the contradictions anymore."
tagline: "American historian, physicist and philosopher (1922 – 1996)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Thomas_Kuhn_(1977)_(cropped).jpg?width=1200"
gender: "male"
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birthDate: "1922-07-18"
deathDate: "1996-06-17"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born July 18, 1922, and trained as a physicist before turning to the history and philosophy of science. In 1962 he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which upended the tidy story of science as steady accumulation. Kuhn claimed that fields lurch through "paradigm shifts" — wholesale breaks where new approaches open and old certainties lose their grip — and that scientific truth at any moment is defined not by pure objectivity but by the consensus of a community working inside shared assumptions. Competing paradigms, he argued, are often incommensurable: no clean translation of terms or worldviews, which means science can never escape the subjective conditioning of the people doing it. The book made "paradigm shift" an English idiom and rattled both labs and lecture halls. He died June 17, 1996.