Kuhn, Thomas Samuel (1922–1996)
US historian and philosopher of science, who showed that social and cultural conditions affect the directions of science. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) argued that even scientific knowledge is relative, dependent on the paradigm (theoretical framework) that dominates a scientific field at the time.
Such paradigms (for example, Darwinism and Newtonian theory) are so dominant that they are uncritically accepted as true, until a ‘scientific revolution’ creates a new orthodoxy. Kuhn's ideas have also influenced ideas in the social sciences.
| He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1922. He studied physics at Harvard, and worked there 1948–57. He then moved to Berkeley until 1964, Princeton until 1979, and for the rest of his career was at MIT. |
