American historian, physicist and philosopher (1922 – 1996)
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.
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…
Sourced, dated quotes from Thomas Kuhn
If a demarcation criterion exists (we must not, I think, seek a sharp or decisive one), it may lie just in that part of science which Sir Karl ignores.
Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.
I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort.
History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.
Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded.
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