By 1964, he had made his way to Princeton, and ended his career at M.I.T. He never returned to physics professionally.
PARADIGM SHIFT SPARROW FULL
But the Harvard faculty denied him tenure in 1956, after which he left for Berkeley, where he was eventually made a full professor of the history of science in 1961. in physics in 1949, and continuing on to teach the history of science. After the war, Kuhn returned to academic life at Harvard, receiving a Ph.D. Conant, who served as both president of Harvard and the head of OSRD. It was in these jobs that he became close with James B. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). After graduating, he became a junior researcher on radar, first at Harvard and then in Europe at the U.S. He attended Harvard - where his father, a hydraulic engineer, had also studied - and earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1943. Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati in 1922. It behooves us to bear this in mind as we take the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary to revisit his book and the controversies surrounding it. As he discovered, these boundaries are not always clear. Kuhn’s work was ultimately an examination of the borders between the scientific and the metaphysical, and between the scientific community and society at large. Still others considered him neither a relativist nor an authoritarian, but simply misunderstood. For others, Kuhn was an authoritarian whose work legitimized science as an elitist power structure. For some, Kuhn was a relativist, a prophet of postmodernism who considered truth a social construct built on the outlook of a community at a specific point in history. The book and its disparate interpretations have given rise to ongoing disagreements over the nature of science, the possibility of progress, and the availability of truth. Kuhn’s thesis has been hotly debated among historians and philosophers of science since it first appeared.
Kuhn concluded that the path of science through these revolutions is not necessarily toward truth but merely away from previous error. Since scientists’ worldview after a paradigm shift is so radically different from the one that came before, the two cannot be compared according to a mutual conception of reality. Paradigm shifts interrupt the linear progression of knowledge by changing how scientists view the world, the questions they ask of it, and the tools they use to understand it. Sometimes, the dominant scientific way of looking at the world becomes obviously riddled with problems this can provoke radical and irreversible scientific revolutions that Kuhn dubbed “paradigm shifts” - introducing a term that has been much used and abused. Instead, he argued, what scientists discover depends to a large extent on the sorts of questions they ask, which in turn depend in part on scientists’ philosophical commitments. Kuhn challenged the traditional view of science as an accumulation of objective facts toward an ever more truthful understanding of nature. Fifty years ago, Thomas Kuhn, then a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, released a thin volume entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
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