Thomas Kuhn obituary (fwd)
Peter Smagorinsky (psmagorinsky who-is-at uoknor.edu)
Fri, 21 Jun 96 14:35:43 -0500
>
> The New York Times, June 19, 1996, p. B7.
>
>
> 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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Peter Smagorinsky
University of Oklahoma
College of Education
Department of Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum
820 Van Vleet Oval
Norman, OK 73019-0260
office phone: (405)325-3533
fax: (405)325-4061
psmagorinsky who-is-at uoknor.edu