Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm [Obituary]
By Lawrence Van Gelder
Thomas S. Kuhn, whose theory of sclentific revolution
became a profoundly influential landmark of 20th-century
intellectual history, died on Monday at his home in
Cambridge, Mass. He was 73.
Robert Dilorio, associate director of the news office at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the
scholar, who held the title of professor emeritus at
M.I.T., had been ill with cancer in recent years.
"The Structure of Scientific RevoIutions," was conceived
while Protessor Kuhn was a graduate student in theoretical
physics and published as a monograph in the International
Encyclopedia of Unified Science before the University of
Chicago Press issued it as a 180-page book in 1962. The
work punctured the widely held notion that scientific
change was a strictly rational process.
Professor's Kuhn's treatise influenced not only scientists
but also economists, historians, sociologists and
philosophers, touching off considerable debate. It has sold
about one million copies in 16 languages and remains
required reading in many basic courses in the history and
philosophy of science.
Dr. Kuhn, a professor of philosophy and history of science
at M.I.T. from 1979 to 1983 and the Laurence S. Rockefeller
Professor of Philosophy there from 1983 until 1991, was the
author or co-author of five books and scores of articles on
the philosophy and history of science. But Dr. Kuhn
remained best known for "The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions."
His thesis was that science was not a steady, cumulative
acquisition of knowledge. Instead, he wrote, it is "a
series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually
violent revolutions." And in those revolutions, he wrote,
"one conceptual world view is replaced by another."
Thus, Einstein's theory of relativity could challenge
Newton's concepts of physics. Lavoisier's discovery of
oxygen could sweep away earlier ideas about phlogiston, the
imaginary element believed to cause combustion. Galileo's
supposed experiments with wood and lead balls dropped from
the Leaning Tower of Pisa could banish the Aristotelian
theory that bodies fell at a speed proportional to their
weight. And Darwin's theory of natural selection could
overthrow theories of a world governed by design.
Professor Kuhn argued in the book that the typical
scientist was not an objective, free thinker and skeptic.
Rather, he was a somewhat conservative individual who
accepted what he was taught and appiied his knowledge to
solving the problems that came before him.
In so doing, Professor Kuhn maintained, these scientists
accepted a paradigm, an archetypal solution to a problem,
like Ptolemy's theory that the Sun revolves around the
Earth. Generally conservative, scientists would tend to
solve problems in ways that extended the scope of the
paradigm.
In such periods, he maintained, scientists tend to resist
research that might signal the development of a new
paradigm, like the work of the astronomer Aristarchus, who
theorized in the third century B.C. that the planets
revolve around the Sun. But, Professor Kuhn said,
situations arose that the paradigm could not account for or
that contradicted it.
And then, he said, a revolutionary would appear, a
Lavoisier or an Einstein, often a young scientist not
indoctrinated in the accepted theories, and sweep the old
paradigm away.
These revolutions, he said, came only after long periods of
tradition-bound normal science. "Frameworks must be lived
with and explored before they can be broken," Professor
Kuhn said.
The new paradigm cannot build on the one that precedes it,
he maintained. It can only supplant it. The two, he said,
were "incommensurable."
Some critics said Professor Kuhn was arguing that scieace
was little more than mob rule. He replied, "Look, I think
that's nonsense, and I'm prepared to argue that."
The word paradigm appeared so frequently in Professor's
Kuhn's "Structures" and with so many possible meanings
prompting debate that he was credited with popularizing the
word and inspiring a 1974 cartoon in The New Yorker. In.
it, a woman tells a man: "Dynamite, Mr. Gerston! You're the
first person I ever heard use 'paradigm' in real life."
Professor Kuhn traced the origin of his thesis to a moment
in 1947 when he was working toward a doctorate in physics
at Harvard. James B. Conant, the chemist who was the
president of the university, had asked him to teach a class
in science for undergraduates majoring in the humanities.
The focus was to be historical case studies.
Until then, Professor Kuhn said later, "I'd never read an
old document in science." As he looked through Aristotle's
"Physics" and realized how astonishingly unlike Newton's
were its concepts of motion and matter, he concluded that
Aristotle's physics were not "bad Newton" but simply
different.
Professor Kuhn received a doctorate in physics, but not
long afterward he switched to the history of science
exploring the mechanisms that lead to scientific change.
"I sweated blood and blood and blood, and finally I had a
breakthrough," he said.
Thomas Samuel Kuhn, the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, an
industrial engineer, and the former Annette Stroock, was
born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati.
In 1943, he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with a
bachelor's degree in physics.
During World War II, he served as a civilian employee at
Harvard and in Europe with the Office of Scientific
Research and Development.
He received master's and doctoral degrees in physics from
Harvard in 1946 and 1949. From 1948 to 1956, he held
various posts at Harvard, rising to an assistant
professorship in general education and the history of
science.
He then joined the faculty of the University of California
at Berkeley, where he was named a professor of history of
science in 1961. In 1964, he joined the faculty at
Princeton, where he was the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of
Philosophy and History of Science until 1979, when he
joined the faculty of M.I.T.
Professor Kuhn was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954-55, the
winner of the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science
in 1982, and the holder of honorary degrees from many
institutions, among them the University of Notre Dame,
Columbia University, the University of Chicago the
University of Padua and the University of Athens.
He is survived by his wife, Jehane and three children,
Sarah Kuhn of Framingham, Mass., Elizabeth Kuhn of Los
Angeles and Nathaniel Kuhn of Arlington, Mass.
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