Thomas kuhn

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (Cincinnati, July 18, 1922-Cambridge, June 17, 1996) was an American physicist, philosopher of science and historian, known for his contribution to the change in orientation of scientific philosophy and sociology in the 1960s.

Kuhn received his doctorate in physics from Harvard University in 1949 and was in charge of an academic course on the History of Science at that university from 1948 to 1956. After leaving the position, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley until 1964, at Princeton University until 1979, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 1991.

In 1962, Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (The structure of scientific revolutions), a work in which he exposed the evolution of basic natural sciences from a so that it differed substantially from the most general vision until then. According to Kuhn, the sciences do not progress following a uniform process through the application of a hypothetical scientific method. Instead, there are two different phases of scientific development. Initially, there is a broad consensus in the scientific community on how to exploit the advances made in the past in the face of existing problems, thus creating universal solutions that Kuhn called a «paradigm».

The term «paradigm» designates all commitments shared by a community of scientists. On the one hand, the theoretical, ontological, and beliefs and, on the other, those that refer to the application of theory and problem-solving models. Paradigms are, therefore, something more than a set of axioms (to clarify his notion of paradigm Kuhn invokes the Wittgensteinian notion of «universes of discourse») ^{[citation required]}. He had some differences with Herbert Blumer mainly due to science and methodologies. Kuhn accepts the symbolic interactionism approach to actors and their thoughts as well as their actions.

The last stage of his thought is colored by a marked Darwinism. He almost completely abandons the discourse about paradigms, and restricts the concept of scientific revolution to that of a process of speciation and specialization by which a scientific discipline limits the margins of its object of study, moving away from the horizons of other specialties.. In this last sense, as a form of restricted holism that affects the different branches of scientific development, the concept of theoretical incommensurability reappears, the only one that Kuhn seems to have maintained until the end of his days.

Biography

Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States, the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn, both of Jewish origin. He graduated from Taft School in Watertown, CT, in 1940, where he sparked his interest in mathematics and physics. He graduated in physics in 1943 from Harvard University, and there he obtained his master's and doctorate degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949 respectively, under the supervision of John Van Vleck. As he pointed out in the first pages of the preface to the second edition of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” his three years of total academic freedom as a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University were crucial. in his transition from physics to the history and philosophy of science. Later, at the suggestion of the president of Harvard University, James Conant, he taught the history of science course from 1948 to 1956.

In 1961, Kuhn taught in the departments of philosophy and history at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was appointed Professor of the History of Science. Kuhn interviewed the Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before his death.Teaching at Berkeley, he wrote and published (in 1962) his most renowned and influential work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

In 1964 he became a professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. He was president of the Society for the History of Science from 1969 to 1970. In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy where he remained until 1991. In 1994 he was diagnosed with lung cancer, dying in 1996.

Thomas Kuhn was married twice, first to Kathryn Muhs, with whom he had three children; and then with Jehane Barton Burns (Jehane R. Kuhn).

Historical context

Despite not having a degree in philosophy, Thomas Kuhn is one of the most important philosophers of science of the 20th century; introduced the concept of the influence of sociological and psychological factors on the development of science and the paradigm, his work being The structure of scientific revolutions , a perspective of knowledge totally different from that of the time of the. What Kuhn established in his work was that the development of science was influenced by previous knowledge established in theories and laws created by a group of scientists or specialists, that is, by a scientific community. This implies that prior knowledge is needed to understand current science. When specialists are involved in an investigation, they formulate a hypothesis that is influenced by a priori knowledge. When this can explain the phenomena of the investigation, there is confidence in it, but if there is an anomaly that current science cannot explain, a radical change is generated in normal (current) science that leads to what Kuhn calls a crisis; what later becomes a scientific revolution.

Kuhn from his childhood received a careful education in various private schools, characterized by their unconventional teaching methods and their liberal and progressive ideas. He obtained his doctorate in physics for his thesis The Cohesive Energy of Monovalent Metals as a Function of Their Atomic Quantum Defects, from Harvard University, however his occupation in the area of physics was not complete since for a time he dedicated himself to the chair of the philosophy of science, since he was assigned a project whose objective was to introduce the study of physics and biology in the education of all university students. The preparation for these classes brought him face to face with what would be the great theme of his subsequent research: the contextual, “paradigmatic” nature of science.^{[citation required]} For this door entered the history and philosophy of science, to which, later, he would dedicate himself fully.

Thomas Kuhn published his work in 1962, at a time when the Cold War between the United States and the USSR was at its height. All this had unleashed a paranoia on the part of certain groups against communists, or Americans who had communist ideas, which had led to the creation of the Committee on Un-American Activities, later converted into a Standing Committee (1945-1975) whose function was to investigate people of subversion or communist propaganda. Thomas Kuhn worked since 1956 at the University of California Berkeley, center of liberal ideas and scene of riots in the sixties. Therefore, since Kuhn entered the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1951-1956), he was in direct contact with the idea of revolution and the influence of social aspects in the development of science.^{[citation required]}

Before Kuhn, this aspect of the philosophy of science had not aroused much attention, but the concept that the history of science had a transcendental scope was introduced by various authors, including Émile Meyerson, in his book Identity and reality (1908). This work tells us that the history of science reveals how the spirit imposes its unit schemes on matter, reducing it almost to pure geometry in the Platonic way (Kuhn, 20). Alexandre Koyré, in turn, defended the idea that development depends on theory rather than experiment, since ideas precede experimental tests and do not derive from accidents in experimentation.

One of the important events that marked Kuhn's thinking was in 1947 when he was asked to interrupt for a while the physics project he was carrying out at the time to prepare a series of lectures on the origins of the mechanics of space. 17th century. He had to review the scientific texts prior to his time, which he turned over and over without understanding their true meaning and rather, on the contrary, wondering how it could be possible that men as intelligent as Aristotle or Galileo would have thought apparently crazy things, until they he discovered another way of reading the texts: identifying the meaning of each text in each historical period, that is, applying hermeneutics.^{[citation required]} It was hermeneutics that allowed him to continue to consider as scientific the works of earlier times even if they have been discarded in the present.

Main contributions

Kuhn's ideas can be summarized by a simple number of points:

• "If history is considered to be more than a deposit of anecdotes or chronology, it can produce a decisive transformation of the image we currently have of science." History is more than an anecdote; seeing it that way is a judgment error.

• According to normal history, history is an accumulation of facts.

• Discarded theories do not cease to be scientific by any more nonsense they seem today; in their time and with the knowledge and opinions of their time they are extremely logical.^{[chuckles]required]}

• Science, or better said its history, is not an accumulation of knowledge over time, but changes of paradigms in the course of this.

• There is a historiographic revolution of accumulated knowledge to the continual change of paradigms.

• The scientific method can give different hypotheses and research depending on the education and viewpoint of the observer. The reason why different paradigms arise from a new phenomenon.

• Normal science in an effort to defend its theory tries to adjust reality to its model (simplifications?)

• Normal science has anomalies that new science tries to explain. Changing the existing theory by a new theory not only means a new explanation of the universe but, in many cases, a re-invention of the spectrum of theories and rules governing it, a re-invention of the facts and phenomena seen by theory. This is costly and takes a long time, which normal theory cannot usually do. And it is wonderful that one cannot be attributed to one person but to a group of people.^{[chuckles]required]}

• In order to analyze a paradigm and its history it is necessary to highlight the historical integrity of that same theory at the time it developed.

The answers that Kuhn gives to the initial questions, which are reflected in the work The structure of scientific revolutions, from 1962, meant a great change in the philosophical debate of the moment, since the model The prevailing formalist approach was challenged by Kuhn's historicist approach, according to which science develops in certain phases:

1. Establishment of a paradigm
2. Normal science
3. Crisis
4. Scientific revolution
5. Establishment of a new paradigm

"Galileo's opinions are not compared with current ones but with those of his contemporaries."

Science is a constellation of facts, theory, and methods, which, having good results or not, have endeavored to contribute one element or another to that particular constellation. The normal history of science becomes a discipline that relates and records these successive increases and the obstacles that have inhibited their accumulation. So the historian has two fundamental tasks, the first to establish when each fact, law or contemporary scientific theory was invented and discovered, and on the other hand, he must describe the set of errors, myths and superstitions that prevented the most rapid accumulation of information. ^{[citation required]}

For Kuhn, a scientific revolution is an episode of non-cumulative development in which an old paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by a new one that is incompatible with it. In the same way that a political revolution begins with the dissatisfaction of a segment of the community that the institutions have stopped working properly, scientific revolutions are initiated by the growing sensation of a segment of the scientific community that the existing paradigm has ceased to exist. to work.

But the nature of the revolution lies not exactly in an increase in the maturity and refinement of the human conception of the nature of science but in a change of the conception of the scientific community, of its problems and norms. For example, to explain gravitational attractions, Einstein took science back to the time before Newton, so the concept of continuous progress is not fully supported.

The early stages of the development of the sciences have been characterized by a continuous competition between a series of different conceptions of nature, each of which was partially derived from observation and the scientific method, each being to some extent compatible between them. Yeah. In this sense, there is no methodological error, but experience and observation must drastically limit scientific beliefs; otherwise there would be no science. By themselves they cannot determine a particular body of such beliefs, but also derive from arbitrary elements such as historical and personal incidents, which does not mean that a group of scientists cannot practice their profession without a given set of received beliefs, nor does it make the particular constellation effectively professed by the group at any given time less important. Effective research is only just beginning before the scientific community believes that it has found firm answers to firmly entrenched questions. In chapters III, IV and V, he mentions that nature is allowed to enter through the conceptual frameworks provided by education.

However, the very nature of research ensures that innovation will not be suppressed for long. The latter occurs when the profession cannot ignore anomalies that arise from scientific practices. It is then that new types of practices begin to be seen in those episodes in which this change in professional commitments takes place. Normal science means research firmly based on one or more past scientific facts, achievements that some particular scientific community recognizes, for a certain time, as the foundation for its subsequent practice.

Paradigm

It considered paradigms as universally recognized scientific achievements that, for some time, provide models of problems and solutions to a scientific community

Thomas Kuhn.

The philosopher and scientist Thomas Kuhn gave paradigm its contemporary meaning when he adopted it to refer to the set of practices that defined a scientific discipline during a specific period.

• What should be observed and scrutinized.
• The type of questions that are supposed to be asked to find answers in relation to the objective.
• How such questions should be structured.
• How the results of scientific research should be interpreted.
• "His success is unprecedented enough to attract a lasting group of supporters, away from the competition aspects of scientific activity."
• "Incomplete enough to leave many problems to be solved by the narrow group of scientists."
• “In the absence of a paradigm or of a paradigm candidate, all the facts that might be relevant to the development of a given science are likely to appear equally important.” Before the first universally accepted paradigm can exist multiple paradigms coexisting even if they are mutually exclusive.
• "The new paradigm implies a new and more rigid definition of the field. Those who do not wish or are not able to adjust their work to the field should continue in isolation or join some other group."
• "The paradigms get their status as such, because they are more successful than their competitors to solve a few problems that the group of professionals has come to recognize as acute. However, the most successful does not mean that it has a complete success in solving a particular problem or that of sufficiently satisfactory results with a considerable number of problems."

The common investigations of a normal science are three:

1. The kind of facts that the paradigm has shown are particularly revealing of the nature of things. If those measurements that are believed need greater precision.
2. The experiments that give validity to theory.
3. Meeting of facts of normal science and physical ambiguities.

Kuhnian model of scientific development

The stages of science according to Kuhn.

Science immature

Before normal science, it is characterized by a series of schools and subschools of thought that are not yet science because they do not have a common paradigm.

For example during the centuryXVII There were a series of theories that tried to explain the electric phenomenon; among them were the theories of Benjamin Franklin, Stephen Gray and Thomas A. Watson. This science is characterized because it still tries to explain a fundamental aspect of its theory.

Normal science

It means research based firmly on one or more past scientific realities, achievements that some particular scientific community recognizes for some time as the basis for its subsequent practice.

Scientific crisis

Since normal science is not exempt from mistakes or contradictions in its scientific model, there may be anomalies that cannot be explained, or another phenomenon that cannot be solved is then when a scientific crisis is generated.

Scientific revolution

It is generated by the emergence of a new paradigm, which supplants another so that scientists turn to other theories that can explain it while others seek to resolve it with new theories.

Extraordinary science

It starts with the set of anomalies, unsolved problems that are evident from the current paradigm. These produce crises that cause the proliferation of other paradigms, and later through a scientific consensus they will be reduced to one that will start normal science until the cycle is repeated.

Method and objective

Method

Thomas S. Kuhn's method is not that of a social analysis in history by means of understanding the epochs and their theories by analyzing how they relate to each other. That is to say, it does not matter to know that the geocentric theory has value in today's world, much less if it seems illogical to us (something that could be applied in theology); the only thing that matters is the scientific validity in his time, not its current scientific validity. The paradigm shift is not necessarily evolutionary, sometimes it divides one science into several.

Target

The objective of Kuhn's philosophy was to show the world that science is not only a contrast and neutral between theories and what we can call reality, but that there are other factors between defenders of the different paradigms such as the debate, dialogue, struggles and tensions between them. He also, with his reading, implies that science as such cannot transcend, since he only did so in the phases of normal science, since now they are only breaks in that continuity.

The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of philosophy of science: in addition to "paradigm shift," Kuhn posited the word "paradigm" itself from a term that used in certain forms of linguistics in its current broader sense, he coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely party responsible for the use of the term "scientific revolutions", in the plural, which will take place at different periods of time and in different disciplines, rather than a single "scientific revolution" in the last years of the Renaissance. Frequent use of the phrase "paradigm shift" has made scientists better aware of, and in many cases more receptive to, paradigm shifts, so Kuhn's discussion of the evolution of scientific viewpoints has been influential throughout. himself in that evolution.

Works

• The Copernican Revolution (1957)
• The role of dogma in scientific research (1961).
• The structure of scientific revolutions (1962).
• Second thoughts on paradigms (1970)
• Essential tension (1977).
• The theory of black body and quantum discontinuity (1987).