Kuhn, Thomas (Samuel)

(born July 18, 1922, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.—died June 17, 1996, Cambridge, Mass.) U.S. historian and philosopher of science. He taught at Berkeley (1956–64), Princeton (1964–79), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979–91). In his highly influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), he questioned the previously accepted view of scientific progress as a gradual accumulation of knowledge based on universally valid experimental methods and results, claiming that progress was often achieved by far-reaching “paradigm shifts.” His other works include The Copernican Revolution (1957), The Essential Tension (1977), and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity (1978).

Kuhn, Thomas (Samuel) (1922– ) philosopher, historian of science; born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Trained as a physicist, he became interested in the historical development of science and in 1962 published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a study of how scientific theories are formed, judged, and supplanted; its proposition that even the most "objective" scientific theories are influenced by external factors has had wide currency in many areas of contemporary thought. He taught at Harvard (1948–57), the University of California: Berkeley (1957–64), Princeton (1964–79), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (from 1979).