- Length
- 264 pagesUniversity of Chicago Press, 50th anniversary edition 2012, with an introduction by Ian Hacking
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The book that put paradigm and paradigm shift into every language, written by a historian of science who thought philosophers had described a method nobody uses. It appeared, remarkably, as a monograph in the logical positivists' own encyclopedia project, and it undermined most of what that project stood for.
- Date
- 1962
- Author
- Thomas S. Kuhn
- Region
- Berkeley, United States
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Genealogical — History of a concept used as a critique of it
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 28 years
Published inside the Vienna Circle's own encyclopedia, which it helped to kill, and one of the most cited academic books of the twentieth century in any field.
What the book says
An account of how science actually changes, written by a physicist who had been asked to teach its history and found that the textbooks described something that had never happened. Most science, Kuhn argues, is not a search for novelty. It is normal science: puzzle-solving conducted within a framework that supplies the problems, the standards for a good solution and the training of practitioners - a framework he calls a paradigm, and which is transmitted less by rules than by worked examples. Normal science is unusually productive precisely because it does not question its foundations. But puzzles resist, anomalies accumulate, and when enough of them accumulate the community enters crisis; competing frameworks appear, and eventually one displaces the other. The displacement is not a matter of the new theory explaining everything the old one did and more. The two frameworks pose different questions, count different things as data, and use the same words differently, so that the choice between them cannot be settled by evidence alone - and Kuhn describes the change as a conversion, and says that after it the scientists are working in a different world.
What it argues
That scientific change is discontinuous, and that the discontinuity is not a failure of rationality but a consequence of how research works. A paradigm is not a theory; it is a whole package of assumptions, techniques, standards and exemplary solutions, learned by doing problems rather than by memorising rules, and it makes precise work possible by settling in advance what does not need to be asked. Revolutions occur when the accumulated failures make the framework untenable, and what follows is not an experiment that decides between rivals but a shift in the whole way the field is seen - a gestalt switch, in Kuhn's comparison. Because the rival frameworks are incommensurable, sharing no neutral vocabulary in which their claims can be compared point by point, the change cannot be reduced to evidence, though evidence is involved throughout.
What it answered
Popper on method, and the logical positivists on the cumulative growth of knowledge. Both had described science as a rational reconstruction: a sequence of theories assessed against evidence by rules that could be stated. Kuhn's evidence is historical - the Copernican revolution, the chemical revolution, the discovery of oxygen and of X-rays - and his claim is that the actual episodes do not fit, and that the textbooks conceal this by rewriting the past to look like a steady approach to the present.
How it argues
By historical case, with the philosophy emerging from the narrative rather than stated in advance. This is the book's strength and the source of most complaints against it: the concepts are introduced through examples and never given the formal definitions philosophers wanted, which is why paradigm was found to be used in twenty-one distinct senses by one hostile counter and why Kuhn spent the postscript sorting it out. The prose is clear and quick and requires no scientific training.
The moment
Kuhn was a Harvard physics PhD who was asked to teach a science course for humanities students, read Aristotle's physics expecting it to be bad, and had an experience he described for the rest of his life: it was not bad, it was a different framework, and the failure was in his reading. He wrote the book at Berkeley, where Stanley Cavell introduced him to Wittgenstein and Feyerabend read a draft. Carnap, editing the encyclopedia, wrote to him warmly about the planned monograph in 1960 and 1962.
How it travelled
Further than any philosophical book of its century. Paradigm shift escaped immediately into management, politics, advertising and general speech, usually meaning nothing more than a big change. Within the academy it founded the sociology of scientific knowledge and reoriented the history of science; within philosophy it ended the logical positivist programme it had been published alongside. Kuhn disliked much of what was done with it and spent decades saying so, particularly to those who took him as showing that science is not rational or that theory choice is merely social.
The strongest objection
That incommensurability, taken strictly, makes the history it is meant to explain impossible to write. If rival frameworks share no neutral vocabulary, then Kuhn cannot describe both from outside, compare their claims, or explain to a modern reader what a phlogiston chemist believed - yet the book does all three, at length and successfully. Either the incommensurability is partial, in which case comparison is possible and the dramatic conclusions weaken, or it is total, in which case the book refutes itself by existing. Kuhn's later work moved toward the first, treating it as local untranslatability between particular terms rather than a wall between whole worldviews, which most readers regard as the defensible version and a considerable retreat from what made the book famous.
Why read it
Because it is short, gripping and has shaped how educated people talk about change in every field, usually without their knowing where it came from. Read the 1970 postscript with it - Kuhn's own account of what he meant by paradigm is the necessary corrective to the version in circulation.
- First printed
- 1962
- First in English
- 1962
- Digitised
- No
The 1970 postscript is essential: Kuhn concedes that paradigm had been used in too many senses and separates the two he needs - the shared commitments of a scientific community, and the concrete exemplars by which practitioners are trained.
Written in English and translated into more than twenty languages. In copyright.
Where it stands
Live and contested. Normal science, incommensurability and the training role of exemplars are all working concepts; the relativist readings are largely rejected, including by Kuhn; and the argument about how far theory choice can be reconstructed as rational is unfinished.
On quoting this book
In copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How many senses of paradigm the book uses was a standard complaint and Kuhn conceded the point. Whether incommensurability entails relativism is the largest dispute and Kuhn denied it throughout his life. Whether Carnap's welcome for the monograph shows that positivism and Kuhn were closer than the standard story allows is an active revisionist argument, with critics replying that Carnap read it as history of science rather than philosophy. And how well the account fits sciences other than physics - biology, geology, the social sciences - is questioned by specialists in each.