THOMA

S KUHN
PARADIGMS &
PSYCHOLOGY
 WHO WAS
THOMAS KUH
N?
 • Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18,
1922 – June 17, 1996) was an
American philosopher of science.
• He was the first of two children born to
Samuel L. and Minette Kuhn, with a
brother Roger born several years later.
• His father was a native Cincinnatian
and his mother a native New Yorker.
• Kuhn’s father, Sam, was a hydraulic
engineer, trained at Harvard University
and at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) prior to World War I.
• Thomas Kuhn’s father entered the war,
and served in the Army Corps of
Engineers.
• His mother, Minette, was a liberally
educated person who came from an
affluent family.
ACADEMIC
LIFE
 Kuhn’s early education reflected the family’s liberal
progressiveness. 

• From kindergarten through fifth

grade, he was educated at Lincoln
School, a private progressive school
 in Manhattan, which stressed
independent thinking rather than
learning facts and subjects. The
family then moved to the small town
of Croton-on-Hudson, New York
 where, once again, he attended a
private progressive school – 
Hessian Hills School.
• It was here that, in sixth through ninth
grade, he learned to love mathematics.
He left Hessian Hills in 1937. He
graduated from The Taft School in
Watertown, Connecticut, in 1940.
• He obtained his BSc degree in physics from 
Harvard College in 1943, where he also
obtained MSc and PhD degrees in physics in
1946 and 1949, respectively, under the
supervision of John Van Vleck.
• He was elected to the prestigious Society of
Fellows at Harvard, another of whose members
was W. V. Quine.
• He states that his three years of total academic
freedom as a Harvard Junior Fellow were
crucial in allowing him to switch from physics
to the history and philosophy of science.
CAREE
R
• Thomas Kuhn’s academic life started in physics. He then switched to
history of science, and as his career developed he moved over to
philosophy of science, although retaining a strong interest in the history
of physics.
• Until 1956, Kuhn taught a class in science for undergraduates in the
humanities, as part of the General Education in Science curriculum,
developed by James B. Conant, the President of Harvard. This course was
centered around historical case studies, and this was Kuhn’s first
opportunity to study historical scientific texts in detail.
• Kuhn was initially bewildered at Aristotle’s theories but later found
himself able to understand them. This led Kuhn to concentrate on history
of science and in due course he was appointed to an assistant
professorship in general education and the history of science.
• Kuhn then turned to the history of astronomy, and in 1957 he published
his first book, The Copernican Revolution.
• In 1961 Kuhn became a full professor at the University of
California at Berkeley, having moved there in 1956 to take up
a post in history of science, but in the philosophy department.
This enabled him to develop his interest in the philosophy of
science
• At Berkeley, he discussed a draft of The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions with Feyerabend which was published in 1962 in
the series “International Encyclopedia of Unified Science”,
edited by Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap.
• In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne
Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. He served as
the president of the History of Science Society from 1969 to
1970.
• In 1970, the second edition of The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions was published, including an important postscript
in which Kuhn clarified his notion of paradigm.
CONTRIBUTIONS
TO THE FIELD
His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was
influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing
the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-
language idiom.
Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of science marked not
only a break with several key positivist doctrines, but also
inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought
it closer to the history of science
THE STRUCTURE OF
SCIENTIFIC
REVOLUTION (1962)
 In the book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argued
that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new
knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "
paradigm shifts" (although he did not coin the phrase, he did
contribute to its increase in popularity), in which the nature of
scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed.
In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages.
Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is
followed by "normal science", when scientists attempt to enlarge the
central paradigm by "puzzle-solving". 
Kuhn’s ideology
about Paradigms
 “The entire constellation of
beliefs, values, techniques, and
so on shared by the members of a
given (scientific) community is
called a paradigm.”
-
Thomas Kuhn
• Thomas Kuhn argued that science does not evolve gradually
towards truth.
• Science has a paradigm which remains constant before going
through a paradigm shift when current theories can’t explain
some phenomenon, and someone proposes a new theory.
• A scientific revolution occurs when:
i. The new paradigm better explains the observations, and
offers a model that is closer to the objective, external reality;
and
ii. The new paradigm is incommensurate with the old.
 KUHN’S
PHASES OF
SCIENCE
 Phase 1: Pre-science
• The pre-paradigmatic state refers to a period before a scientific
consensus has been reached.
• Disorganized and diverse activity.
• Constant debate over fundamentals.
• As many theories as there are theorists.
• No commonly accepted observational basis. The conflicting theories
are constituted with their own set of theory-dependent observations.
 Phase 2: Normal Science
• A paradigm is established which lays the foundations for
legitimate work within the discipline. Scientific work then
consists in articulation of the paradigm, in solving puzzles
that it throws up.
• A paradigm is a conventional basis for research; it sets a
precedent.
• Puzzles that resist solutions are seen as anomalies.
• Anomalies are tolerated and do not cause the rejection of the
theory, as scientists are confident these anomalies can be
explained over time.
• Scientists spend much of their time in the Model Drift step,
battling anomalies that have appeared. They may or may not
know this or acknowledge it.
• It is necessary for normal science to be uncritical. If all
scientists were critical of a theory and spent time trying to
falsify it, no detailed work would ever get done.
“Normal Science, the activity in which most scientists
inevitably spend almost all of their time, is predicated
on the assumption that the scientific community knows
what the world is like. Much of the success of the
enterprise derives from the community's willingness to
defend that assumption, if necessary at considerable
cost. Normal Science, for example, often suppresses
fundamental novelties because they are necessarily
subversive of its basic commitments" (Kuhn, 1996, p.
5).
 Phase 3: Crisis
• This is where the paradigm shift occurs.
• Anomalies become serious, and a crisis develops if the anomalies
undermine the basic assumptions of the paradigm and attempts to
remove them consistently fail.
• Under these circumstances the rules for the application of the
paradigm become relaxed. Ideas that challenge the existing
paradigm are developed.
• In crisis there will be ‘extraordinary science’ where there will be
several competing theories.
• If the anomalies can be resolved, the crisis is over and normal
science resumes. If not, there is a scientific revolution which
involves a change of paradigm.
 Phase 4: Revolution
• Eventually a new paradigm will be established, but not as a result of
any logically compelling justification.
• The reasons for the choice of a paradigm are largely psychological
and sociological.
• The new paradigm better explains the observations, and offers a
model that is closer to the objective, external reality
• Different paradigms are held to be incommensurable — the new
paradigm cannot be proven or disproven by the rules of the old
paradigm, and vice versa.
• There is no natural measure or scale for ranking different paradigms.
“Truth emerges more readily
from error than from
confusion.”
- Thomas Kuhn
 references
• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/#LifeCare
• https://www.simplypsychology.org/Kuhn-Paradigm.html
• https://
lms.su.edu.pk/download?filename=1588507690-epdf.pdf&lesson=20
628
• https://
books.google.ws/books?id=RQ44DwAAQBAJ&printsec=copyright#v=o
nepage&q&f=false