He obtained his BSc degree in physics from Harvard College in 1943, where he also obtained MSc and PhD degrees in physics in 19, respectively, under the supervision of John Van Vleck. He graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, in 1940. It was here that, in sixth through ninth grade, he learned to love mathematics. The family then moved 40 mi (64 km) north to the small town of Croton-on-Hudson, New York where, once again, he attended a private progressive school – Hessian Hills School. įrom kindergarten through fifth grade, he was educated at Lincoln School, a private progressive school in Manhattan, which stressed independent thinking rather than learning facts and subjects. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, both Jewish. Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Minette Stroock Kuhn and Samuel L. Science must account for subjective perspectives as well, since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/worldview of its researchers and participants.Įarly life, family and education Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon "objectivity" alone. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Thomas Samuel Kuhn ( / k uː n/ July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.
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