The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Kuhn lays out the aim of his book: he wants to use history to change the way science is viewed and understood. In particular, he hopes to counteract the simplistic narrative that scientific textbooks present. Kuhn argues that these textbooks tell a linear—and misleading—history of progress, in which scientists move away from error and toward a correct set of tools, techniques and concept. 

Recently, historians have been finding it difficult to write this kind of textbook history. For one, scientific discovery is not always chronological, nor is it always easy to ascribe to one person. In addition, current views of nature are not actually any more or less “scientific” than the now-discounted views of the past. Kuhn thus argues that “if these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now produce scientific knowledge.” 

As historians struggle with this problem, Kuhn suggests that “a historiographic revolution in the study of science” is already underway. Rather than studying scientists’ work in relation to modern science, historians now study that work in the context of its own time. And rather than trying to invalidate past scientists, historians have started to try to understand them.

Kuhn describes the “new image of science” that he and his fellow historians are trying to create. First, he wants to de-emphasize method as the main criterion of accuracy. Many scientists use legitimate methods, but their results differ because they have different expectations and beliefs. Kuhn then proposes that there is always something “arbitrary” in the expectations or areas of interest that inform scientific discovery. At the same time, that arbitrariness is necessary for scientists, as it allows them to ask focused questions about nature and to build on one another’s work.

The process by which these arbitrary assumptions are passed down through formal education is, in Kuhn’s words, “normal science.” Normal science “is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like.” It follows, then, that normal science does not encourage—and sometimes actively suppresses—new or divergent ways of thinking about the natural world.

There are some moments, however, when trying to use normal science to solve a problem is impossible. In these moments, scientists question their received (“arbitrary”) assumptions, and they focus their attention in new ways or go back to the drawing board entirely. This is what Kuhn terms “a scientific revolution.” Scientific revolutions cause scientists (and often the broader population) to view and experience the world differently.

There have been many scientific revolutions throughout history. Several of the most well-known revolutions are associated with scientists Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Antoine Lavoisier, and Albert Einstein. However, Kuhn believes that many less famous scientific revolutions are equally important.

Rather than a narrative of incremental progress, then, Kuhn sees scientific history as a cycle: scientific revolutions interrupt normal science, which leads to a new kind of normal science, which is then interrupted again, and so on. Kuhn acknowledges that history is often viewed more as a description than as a field that can cause “conceptual transformation.” Yet he feels that his “circular” understanding of the history of science has “something important to tell us.”