Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 2012.
- Bird, Alexander, "Thomas Kuhn", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/thomas-kuhn/>.
Thomas Samuel Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time.
The central idea of this work is that the development of science is driven, in normal periods of science, by adherence to what Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’. The functions of a paradigm are to supply puzzles for scientists to solve and to provide the tools for their solution. A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’. Crisis is followed by a scientific revolution if the existing paradigm is superseded by a rival.
Kuhn's contribution to the philosophy of science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines, but also inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought it closer to the history of science. His account of the development of science held that science enjoys periods of stable growth punctuated by revisionary revolutions. To this thesis, Kuhn added the controversial ‘incommensurability thesis’, that theories from differing periods suffer from certain deep kinds of failure of comparability.
Kuhn claimed that it was science that guided the ‘incommensurable’ differences between the different science paradigms, which meant that there was ‘no common measure for being able to assess the difference among scientific theories:’
Kuhn claimed that science guided by one paradigm would be ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a different paradigm, by which is meant that there is no common measure for assessing the different scientific theories. This thesis of incommensurability, developed at the same time by Feyerabend, rules out certain kinds of comparison of the two theories and consequently rejects some traditional views of scientific development, such as the view that later science builds on the knowledge contained within earlier theories, or the view that later theories are closer approximations to the truth than earlier theories of these, such as the thesis of incommensurability, underwent transformation in the process.
In reviewing how the World Wide Web developed, Kuhn’s thinking that “all the members of a scientific community must share in the course of a [scientific] revolution. Revolutions should be described not in terms of group experience but in terms of the varied experiences of individual group members. Indeed, that variety itself turns out to play an essential role in the evolution of scientific knowledge.”
In the context of my research, the invention of the Internet and the World Wide Web is a paradigm shift that follows the scientific revolution path laid out by Kuhn. The shift to a digital, mobile, networked world has radically affected every aspect of society in every corner of the world. The enabling technologies of Semantic search has the potential to bring about a further shift along this new paradigm: the shift between human cognition and machine-driven cognition. What this will mean for the role of artifacts in shaping Holocaust remembrance and its impact on digital discovery, is an arena that my research will need also to cover.
