Requirements:
A paper of 1500 words (minimum word count—any paper more than 150 words short of this
minimum will not be accepted as a complete paper). There is no maximum. You may use
whatever citation format you wish (MLA, Chicago, etc.) but you MUST HAVE REFERENCES.
There is no minimum or maximum number required, however.
Prompt:
Choose what you believe to be a paradigmatic conceptual framework in the history of science
covered up to this point in the course. Your argument should refer to the specific stages and
concepts Kuhn uses to describe paradigm shifts. (For example, what are some of the key
anomalies of the previous paradigm? Which of these anomalies became critical anomalies?
What were the specific crises these anomalies generated? How does the new paradigm deal
with these?)
Your argument should include the following:
• why the framework is paradigmatic (i.e., why is it so fundamental that it rose to the
level of a 'worldview'?)
• how it evolved from the previous paradigm it replaced
• specific historical examples of the paradigm’s evolution
Microsoft Word - Kuhn_2.docx
INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA of UNIFIED SCIENCE
The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions
Second Edition, Enlarged
Thomas S. Kuhn
VOLUMES I AND II • FOUNDATIONS OF THE UNITY OF SCIENCE
VOLUME II • NUMBER 2
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science
Editor-in-Chief Otto Neurath
Associate Editors Rudolf Carnap Charles Mo
is
Foundations of the Unity of Science
(Volumes I—II of the Encyclopedia)
Committee of Organization
RUDOLF CARNAP CHARLES MORRIS
PHILIPP FRANK OTTO NEURATH
JOERGEN JOERGENSEN LOUIS ROUGIER
Advisory Committee
NIELS BOHR R. VON MISES
EGON BRUNSWIK G. MANNOURY
J. CLAY ERNEST NAGEL
JOHN DEWEY ARNE NAESS
FEDERIGO ENRIQUES HANS REICHENBACH
HERBERT FEIGL ABEL REY
CLARK L. HULL BERTRAND RUSSELL
WALDEMAR KAEMPFFERT L. SUSAN STEBBING
VICTOR F. LENZEN ALFRED TARSKI
JAN LUKASIEWICZ EDWARD C. TOLMAN
WILLIAM M. MALISOFF JOSEPH H. WOODGER
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO 60637
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, LTD., LONDON
© 1962, 1970 by The University of Chicago.
All rights reserved. Published 1962.
Second Edition, enlarged, 1970
Printed in the United States of America
XXXXXXXXXX8
ISBN: XXXXXXXXXXclothbound); XXXXXXXXXXpape
ound)
Li
ary of Congress Catalog Card Number: XXXXXXXXXX
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science
Volume 2 • Number 2
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas S. Kuhn
Contents:
XXXXXXXXXXPREFACE .......................................... XXXXXXXXXXv
I. INTRODUCTION: A ROLE FOR HISTORY XXXXXXXXXX1
II. THE ROUTE TO NORMAL SCIENCE ..... XXXXXXXXXX10
III. THE NATURE OF NORMAL SCIENCE .. XXXXXXXXXX23
IV. NORMAL SCIENCE AS PUZZLE-SOLVING XXXXXXXXXX
V. THE PRIORITY OF PARADIGMS ........... XXXXXXXXXX43
VI. ANOMALY AND THE EMERGENCE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES 52
VII. CRISIS AND THE EMERGENCE OF SCIENTIFIC THEORIES XXXXXXXXXX
VIII. THE RESPONSE TO CRISIS .......................... XXXXXXXXXX77
IX. THE NATURE AND NECESSITY OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS 92
X. REVOLUTIONS AS CHANGES OF WORLD VIEW XXXXXXXXXX111
XI. THE INVISIBILITY OF REVOLUTIONS .. XXXXXXXXXX136
XII. THE RESOLUTION OF REVOLUTIONS XXXXXXXXXX144
XIII. PROGRESS THROUGH REVOLUTIONS XXXXXXXXXX160
XXXXXXXXXXPostscript-1969 ................................ XXXXXXXXXX174
iii
Preface
The essay that follows is the first full published report on a project
originally conceived almost fifteen years ago. At that time I was a
graduate student in theoretical physics already within sight of the end
of my dissertation. A fortunate involvement with an experimental
college course treating physical science for the non-scientist provided
my first exposure to the history of science. To my complete surprise, that
exposure to out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically
undermined some of my basic conceptions about the nature of science
and the reasons for its special success.
Those conceptions were ones I had previously drawn partly from
scientific training itself and partly from a long-standing avocational
interest in the philosophy of science. Somehow, whatever their
pedagogic utility and their abstract plausibility, those notions did not at
all fit the enterprise that historical study displayed. Yet they were and
are fundamental to many discussions of science, and their failures of
verisimilitude therefore seemed thoroughly worth pursuing. The result
was a drastic shift in my career plans, a shift from physics to history of
science and then, gradually, from relatively straightforward historical
problems back to the more philosophical concerns that had initially led
me to history. Except for a few articles, this essay is the first of my
published works in which these early concerns are dominant. In some
part it is an attempt to explain to myself and to friends how I happened
to be drawn from science to its history in the first place.
My first opportunity to pursue in depth some of the ideas set forth
elow was provided by three years as a Junior Fellow of the Society of
Fellows of Harvard University. Without that period of freedom the
transition to a new field of study would have been far more difficult and
might not have been achieved. Part of my time in those years was
devoted to history of science proper. In particular I continued to study
the writings of Alex-
Vol. II, No. 2
v
Preface
andre Koyré and first encountered those of Emile Meyerson, Hélène
Metzger, and Anneliese Maier.1 More clearly than most other recent
scholars, this group has shown what it was like to think scientifically in a
period when the canons of scientific thought were very different from
those cu
ent today. Though I increasingly question a few of their
particular historical interpretations, their works, together with A. O.
Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, have been second only to primary source
materials in shaping my conception of what the history of scientific
ideas can be.
Much of my time in those years, however, was spent exploring fields
without apparent relation to history of science but in which research
now discloses problems like the ones history was
inging to my
attention. A footnote encountered by chance led me to the experiments
y which Jean Piaget has illuminated both the various worlds of the
growing child and the process of transition from one to the next.2 One of
my colleagues set me to reading papers in the psychology of perception,
particularly the Gestalt psychologists; another introduced me to B. L.
Whorf’s speculations about the effect of language on world view; and W.
V. O. Quine opened for me the philosophical puzzles of the analytic-
synthetic distinction.3 That is the sort of random exploration that the
Society of Fellows permits, and only through it could I have encountered
Ludwik Fleck’s almost unknown monograph, Entstehung und
Entwicklung einer wis-
1 Particularly influential were Alexandre Koyré, Études Galiléennes (3 vols.;
Paris, 1939); Emile Meyerson, Identity and Reality, trans. Kate Loewenberg (New
York, 1930); Hélène Metzger, Les doctrines chimiques en France du début du XVIIe à
la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1923), and Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave et la doctrine
chimique (Paris, 1930); and Anneliese Maier, Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14.
Jahrhundert (“Studien zur Naturphilosophie der Spätscholastik”; Rome, 1949).
2 Because they displayed concepts and processes that also emerge directly from
the history of science, two sets of Piaget s investigations proved particularly
important: The Child’s Conception of Causality, trans. Marjorie Gabain (London,
1930), and Les notions de mouvement et de vitesse