The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Introduction

Kuhn’s book appeared in 1962 as a volume of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, a series founded by members of the Vienna Circle – an irony often noted, since it undermined their picture of science. Drawing on the history of physics and chemistry, from Copernicus to Lavoisier and Einstein, Kuhn describes how scientific communities are held together by shared exemplars and how revolutions change what counts as a problem and a solution. The concept of paradigm was criticised as vague; in a postscript to the second edition (1970) he distinguished a “disciplinary matrix” from exemplary achievements. His debate with Popper and his followers in London in 1965 was published in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970).

Connections

Criticizes

• The Logic of Scientific Discovery1934 · Karl Popper

Taken up in

• Against Method1975 · Paul Feyerabend
• The Science Question in Feminism1986 · Sandra Harding

Answered in

• Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes1970 · Imre Lakatos

Criticized in

• On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme1974 · Donald Davidson