Share
Blog
Print
Email
BookmarkThere's a "Frank & Ernest" comic strip showing a chick breaking out of its shell, looking around, and saying, "Oh, wow! Paradigm shift!" Blame the late Thomas Kuhn.
See also:
Few indeed are the philosophers or historians influential enough to make it into the funny papers, but Kuhn is one.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is indeed a paradigmatic work in the history of science.
Kuhn's use of terms such as "paradigm shift" and "normal science," his ideas of how scientists move from disdain through doubt to acceptance of a new theory, his stress on social and psychological factors in science--all have had profound effects on historians, scientists, philosophers, critics, writers, business gurus, and even the cartoonist in the street.
Some scientists (such as Steven Weinberg and Ernst Mayr) are profoundly irritated by Kuhn, especially by the doubts he casts--or the way his work has been used to cast doubt--on the idea of scientific progress.
Yet it has been said that the acceptance of plate tectonics in the 1960s, for instance, was sped by geologists' reluctance to be on the downside of a paradigm shift.
Even Weinberg has said that "Structure has had a wider influence than any other book on the history of science." As one of Kuhn's obituaries noted, "We all live in a post-Kuhnian age." --Mary Ellen Curtin .
For more information about the title The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, read the full description at Amazon.com, or see the following related books:
Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves — Is it really possible to change the structure and function of the brain, and in so doing alter how we think and feel? The answer is a resounding yes. ... > read more
Punctuated Equilibrium — In 1972 Stephen Jay Gould took the scientific world by storm with his paper on punctuated equilibrium, written with Niles Eldredge. Challenging a ... > read more
Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith (Philosophy in Action) — Charles Darwin has been at the center of white-hot public debate for more than a century. In Living With Darwin, Philip Kitcher peers into the flames ... > read more
Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution — During a revolution of discovery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, geologists reconstructed the immensely long history of the ... > read more
