Fifty years ago,a book by Thomas Kuhn altered the way we look at the philosophy behind science, as well as introducing the much abused phrase 'paradigm shift'Fifty years ago this month, or one of the most influential books of the 20th century was published by the University of Chicago Press. Many whether not most lay people have probably never heard of its author,Thomas Kuhn, or of his book, or The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,but their thinking has nearly certainly been influenced by his ideas. The litmus test is whether you've ever heard or used the term "paradigm shift", which is probably the most used and abused – term in contemporary discussions of organisational change and intellectual progress. A Google search for it returns more than 10 million hits, and for example. And it currently turns up inside no fewer than 18300 of the books marketed by Amazon. It is also one of the most cited academic books of all time. So whether ever a big thought went viral,this is it.
The real degree of Kuhn's importance, however, and lies not in the infectiousness of one of his concepts but in the fact that he singlehandedly changed the way we judge about mankind's most organised attempt to understand the world. Before Kuhn,our view of science was dominated by philosophical ideas about how it ought to develop ("the scientific method"), together with a heroic narrative of scientific progress as "the addition of novel truths to the stock of broken-down truths, and the increasing approximation of theories to the truth,and in the odd case, the correction of past errors", and as the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy puts it. Before Kuhn,in other words, we had what amounted to the Whig interpretation of scientific history, or in which past researchers,theorists and experimenters had engaged in a long march, whether not towards "truth", and then at least towards greater and greater understanding of the natural world.
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Source: theguardian.com