The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Themes

From physics to chemistry to biology, science textbooks tend to present the history of science as a linear story of progress. Thomas Kuhn, a historian who first trained as a physicist, argues the opposite: in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he suggests that each great scientific discovery ushers in a new way of looking at the world (what Kuhn calls a paradigm), which then prompts a new set of scientific questions and…

Though scientists’ work relies on collecting empirical data, Thomas Kuhn’s treatise The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argues that scientists’ views of the world also play an important role, because their perceptions are what dictate which questions they ask and what they focus on in their research or experiments. As Kuhn sees it, each radically new scientific discovery ushers in a new way of perceiving the world—what Kuhn calls a paradigm—that the scientists in…

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, historian of science Thomas Kuhn argues that many of the most important scientific discoveries are made by individuals. However, these individuals’ insights can only be applied in specific, real-world ways when a larger group of scientists learn about them and accept them as fact. Kuhn thus claims that community is essential to scientific work—only when many scientists have similar educations and a shared set of goals can they…

Science textbooks present science as an endless process of new discovery. But in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, historian Thomas Kuhn argues that the kind of work most scientists do day-to-day actually discourages novelty and original thinking. Instead, Kuhn suggests that there are two different kinds of science: extraordinary science, in which one individual suddenly conceptualizes the world in a new light, and normal science, which involves trying to “force nature” to…